Threat from climate change to some of India’s sacred pilgrimage sites is reshaping religious beliefs

At the pilgrimage site of Kedarnath in northern India, disastrous flooding has led many to ask whether the gods are getting angry about human behavior.

Hindu devotees worship at the Kedarnath Temple in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand. (Shammi Mehra/AFP via Getty Images)

August 15, 2023

By 

David L. Haberman

(The Conversation) — The famous pilgrimage site of Kedarnath, located in the central Himalayas of India, is believed to be a sacred land. It has been referred to as “deva bhumi,” or the “land of the gods,” for centuries.

Millions of people visit this region each year in search of divine blessings and other religious benefits as part of what is known as the Char Dham Yatra, or the pilgrimage to four sacred mountainous abodes devoted to different gods and goddesses. Situated at the base of 20,000-foot snowy peaks, Kedarnath is one of these four major destinations.

The mighty Hindu god Shiva is believed to have manifested in the middle of a meadow in Kedarnath as a conical rock formation that has long been worshiped as a lingam, an embodied form of the deity. A stone temple has stood over the lingam for at least a thousand years, at an altitude of about 12,000 feet.

I visited this area in 2000, 2014 and 2019 as part of research I’ve been conducting for decades on religion, nature and ecology; I have spent numerous summers in the Himalayas. Many in the vast crowds of people on the Char Dham Yatra told me that they believe it is important to undertake this pilgrimage at least once in their lifetime, often identifying it as the most significant journey they will ever perform.

But climate change now threatens the sacred sites of this region. As global temperatures rise, glaciers on the 20,000-foot peaks above Kedarnath that are key sources of the Mandakini River, a major tributary of the Ganges, are melting and retreating at alarming rates. In turn, as I argue in my book, “Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworlds,” climate change disasters are acting as powerful drivers of religious transformations, reshaping religious ideas and practices.

Threats to the Himalayan region

Glacial deterioration is happening worldwide, but subtropical glaciers in high mountainous areas such as the Indian Himalayas are more vulnerable because of their low latitudes. Many climate scientists believe that climate change is affecting the Himalayas more than almost any other region of the world.

Melting glaciers leave massive amounts of water in lakes held in place by unstable natural dams formed of rubble heaped up when the glaciers were healthy and pushing down a slope. The expanding lakes left behind by shrinking glaciers are increasingly prone to glacial lake outburst floods. Another serious danger threatening high mountainous areas as a result of global warming is the shift from snow to extreme rain at increasingly higher altitudes.

Snow clings to hillsides and melts gradually, while rain rushes down slopes immediately, causing destructive erosion, landslides and deluges. The combination of extreme rain and glacial lake outburst floods can lead to deadly flooding, as demonstrated by a catastrophe in Kedarnath in 2013.

Kedarnath disaster

Himalayan researchers determined that in June 2013, more than a foot of rain fell within 24 hours near Kedarnath at elevations never previously recorded. The entire watershed above Kedarnath was filled with raging water. Additionally, the Mandakini River burst out of its banks, causing landslides and devastating flooding.

The Kedarnath Temple pictured amid flood destruction on June 18, 2013.
Strdel/AFP via Getty Images

To make matters worse, the rubble dam that had held back the glacial lake formed by the melting Chorabari Glacier above Kedarnath suddenly breached, releasing a high wall of crashing water. In a matter of 15 minutes, the entire content of the lake was emptied, cresting over three-story buildings with a pounding flow that University of Calcutta scientists estimated was half the volume of Niagara Falls.

Fortunately – or, according to pilgrims, miraculously – a 30-foot oblong boulder rolled down the mountain and stopped just before the ancient temple, parting the powerful waters and protecting the temple so that it remained standing without major damage. Every other building in the town of Kedarnath was demolished.

Government figures claim over 6,000 people died, but those involved in the rescue operations set the figure much higher. Most of the dead were pilgrims.

‘The Gods are angry’

The destructive flooding is changing people’s beliefs. The gods of this region are closely associated with the land itself; and these gods, nature and humans are intimately connected. People living in this region understand the dramatic changes taking place here in terms of this triad.

A resident of Gangotri explained, “The gods are angry with us because of how we are now acting.” When I said to him that I thought this area is where people have been coming for a long time to receive the blessing from the gods, he responded, “Yes, but now they are angry with us. That is why this (Kedarnath disaster) has happened. And more will come if we do not change our ways.”

I found this to be a common view – weather-related disasters were being understood as a result of the immoral actions of human beings, particularly the disregard for the environment.

One significant theological change that appeared to be underway within Himalayan Hinduism as a result of climate change was the transformation of the primary conception of the gods from those who bless to those who punish. “There is so much sin in the world today,” a resident of Uttarkashi told me. “People are making a lot of pollution. Because of this, the climate is changing and the gods are beginning to punish us.”

In some ways there is nothing new in the assertion that human morality and the environment are intimately linked, but the degree of change that is now happening has introduced a new level of concern.

Wandering holy men in this region are witnessing firsthand the dramatic changes in the Himalayas during their years of travel. One holy man living in this area explained, “The gods are nature. When we disrespect nature, we disrespect the gods. They are now angry because of what we are doing to nature. This is why the destructive storms are increasing.”

Conditional hope

All is not lost, however, and there remains some hope for a better outcome. There is a sense that things can still be turned around and the worst avoided if humans are willing to change their ways. Specifically, many articulated this as a return to a more respectful relationship with the gods of the land.

When asked how to please the gods and turn things around, a man in Kedarnath put it simply: “To once again respect the land and nature.” There is no great difference between treating the gods with respect and nature well. A woman I spoke to in Uttarkashi elaborated on this: “The gods and the land are the same. And we are mistreating both. The floods are like a warning slap to a child. They are a wake-up call telling us to change our ways. … If not, we will be finished.”

Human behavior remains a major factor in the holistic worldview that connects humans, gods and environment, and a return to respectful relationships is the key to a sustinable future.

Many Himalayan residents say that humans have the choice to return to a more mutually beneficial relationship with the natural world, but if the gods’ stormy warnings are not heeded, then massive destruction and a gruesome end is near.

Uncertain future

Destructive floods continue to happen in the central Himalayas with increasing force and frequency. Since the 2013 disaster at Kedarnath, more than 800 people have been killed in flash floods in the Char Dham region.

The Kedarnath pilgrimage was suspended in 2022 because of deadly landslides and flooding, but the Indian government has also heavily promoted religious tourism in this area. The year 2022 saw a record number of pilgrims visiting Kedarnath and the three other Char Dham sites in the central Himalayas, which only puts more stress on the land, with additional buildings, crowded roads and polluting vehicles.

With vehicles, factories and other human activities continuing to pump excessive amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, warming the planet, experts fear disasters like Kedarnath saw in 2013 will become only more common.

(David L. Haberman, Professor Emeritus, Religious Studies, Indiana University. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

AN ABUSER

Joseph F. Smith: A traumatized and beloved Mormon leader

Loving, devoted Mormon prophet or rage-prone abuser? Yes to both, says a new biography of Joseph F. Smith.

A new biography from historian Stephen C. Taysom offers a nuanced portrait of the turn-of-the-century Mormon leader. Courtesy of Amazon

August 14, 2023

By 

Jana Riess

(RNS) — In 2000 and 2001, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints focused its worldwide curriculum on the teachings of Joseph F. Smith (1838 – 1918), a nephew of the founding prophet, Joseph Smith Jr. JFS was the church’s sixth president.

An entire lesson in the manual was devoted to “The Wrongful Path of Abuse,” quoting JFS at length about how violence was “unthinkable” and praising him as a “tender and gentle man who expressed sorrow at any kind of abuse. He understood that violence would beget violence, and his own life was an honest expression of compassion and patience, warmth and understanding.”

The lesson’s claim is not wholly untrue, as historian Stephen Taysom points out in the Afterword of his monumental biography of JFS, “Like a Fiery Meteor.” But it’s certainly selective, since JFS admitted in divorce affidavits to beating his first wife, Levira, in the 1860s; the only part he disputed was whether he’d attacked her with a rope or a small stick. He also verbally abused and threatened her, at one point saying he ought to drill a hole in her head and fill it with manure.

JFS is on record for beating a neighbor almost to death in 1873. There were other stories too, with less clear evidence, including a possible beating of his little sister’s teacher when he was still in his early teens. JFS was a turbulent man who admitted that his temper was the worst part of him and that the only man on earth he ever feared was himself.

But the tender side was there as well, especially toward children. Orphaned at a young age —his father, Hyrum, was murdered in the Carthage Jail in 1844, and his mother died when he was a teen — JFS never lost his sympathy for other orphans. He went out of his way to help, and even adopt, children in need. There’s also no record that JFS was ever violent toward his five subsequent plural wives after Levira.

Both responses — the violence and the compassion — stem from the same early trauma, Taysom said in a Zoom interview. “There was always this constant sense that he was going to lose everything that he cherished,” said Taysom, an associate professor at Cleveland State University who has researched JFS for over a decade.

Taysom points out that JFS’ trauma didn’t end with his father’s murder but was followed by many other deaths. His mother, Mary Fielding Smith (she of the famous story of blessing the oxen on the plains), died when he was 13. As an adult he buried 13 of his 45 children, losses that JFS grieved desperately.

Author and professor Stephen C. Taysom

“That always drove him,” Taysom said. “I’m sure that’s the source of the anger that comes out in him. He doesn’t have great control over the ferocious emotions that he has, whether it’s rage or the grief that he feels for losing a child. He either can’t control it or doesn’t control it, which is different from a lot of people in his world. Even in that context of the 19th-century American West, very few people in the church hierarchy would’ve been as prone to violence as he was. I’m not a psychologist, but the inability to regulate strong emotion can be a hallmark of a traumatized person. He definitely had that.”

Another response was JFS’ unwavering, even fundamentalist, religiosity. In the face of ongoing trauma and poverty, he came to see the church as a holy refuge to be protected at all costs. “He’s unapologetically dualistic in the way he views the world,” said Taysom. “He sees everything as either building up the kingdom or destroying it. He sees the world as this dangerous place that kills righteous things.”

This meant he could be hard on other people, just as he was hard on himself. Despite his deep love for his family, for example, he sometimes subjected them to biting criticism and near-impossible standards. “I never encountered him asking forgiveness for someone or apologizing for something. It just wasn’t part of who he was,” Taysom said.

But that inflexible devotion also meant JFS threw himself wholeheartedly into church service. He went on his first mission at age 15, an orphan sent to sink or swim in the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii). He swam: There’s a critical scene in the book where JFS preached in sacrament meeting, served the sacrament and then proceeded to excommunicate nine wayward members of the congregation. He was just 17 years old.

Taysom was impressed by JFS’ fierce commitment to education. Because of his parents’ deaths and his ensuing extreme poverty, he received little formal schooling. When he arrived in Hawaii, his letters home showed he was “barely literate.” But he worked at it constantly, reading everything he could and mastering the English language as well as Hawaiian. (Taysom, who has collected some of the books from JFS’ personal library, has his copy of Dante’s “Inferno.”)

“He is certainly one of the most intelligent church leaders we’ve ever had, just in terms of the capacity to learn things, and coupling that with his real desire to put that to use,” said Taysom.

As the years went by and JFS rose in the ranks of church leadership, he directed that self-taught mind to systematizing doctrine and theology. Taysom says JFS is remembered today for his 1918 Vision of the Redemption of the Dead, which codified much of what Latter-day Saints came to believe about eternal families and temple work. But JFS was keenly interested in theology more broadly and regularly fielded doctrinal questions from church members, giving them detailed and logical explanations from the scriptures.

His craving for tidy systems forever changed the previously more haphazard administration of the church. He brought the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve together in purpose — the power struggles between those two bodies are an interesting thread in the book — and foreclosed for all time the possibility of a succession crisis of the sort that had pertained after the death of Joseph Smith Jr. and to a lesser extent after the deaths of Brigham Young and John Taylor.

The death masks of Joseph, left, and Hyrum Smith, created in the Mansion House in Nauvoo, Illinois, by George Q. Cannon after their martyrdom. The masks were donated to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by the Wilford C. Wood Foundation. Photo by Kenneth R. Mays via Wikimedia Commons

“He imposed an order on things,” said Taysom. “Today, when we ordain somebody to be a deacon, we confer the Aaronic Priesthood on them, and then we ordain them a deacon. But sometimes that was done the other way around until JFS said, ‘No, it has to be done this way because this is how God wants it done.’ So with him, you see this fusion of the performance of things in a certain way and the will of God for them to be that way.”

Smith’s drive to enforce order included an unbending emphasis on sexual purity. He viewed masturbation as a terrible evil (though he couldn’t bring himself to say the word) and believed some Victorian physicians who argued that circumcision could prevent it. So in 1896 JFS arranged for seven of his sons to be circumcised, even though they were far past infancy, then ranging in age from seven to 23. In his mind, whatever pain they experienced from the procedure would be worth it if they could only avoid sin.

Similarly, JFS took a thoroughly uncompromising view of the Albert Carrington case, in which an apostle of the church who had been excommunicated in 1885 for adultery applied in 1887 for rebaptism. Other church leaders leaned toward granting Carrington’s request. “They were saying, ‘Well, Brigham Young would have let him back in,’” said Taysom. But JFS refused, drawing a theological connection between Carrington’s adultery and the “unpardonable sin” mentioned in scripture.

“JFS is saying this is just like denying the Holy Ghost, that it’s a sin next to murder. And so it’s through his writings and teachings that you get this almost strange Mormon way of talking about morality — that when we say ‘immorality’ we mean something sexual, and that you’d rather be dead than have that on your soul.”

In the end, JFS emerges from the biography as a fully drawn human being, full of contradictions. “Some people are going to think I’m trashing him and other people that I’m excusing him,” said Taysom. That makes for a balanced portrait of a complex man who left his defining stamp on The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint Saints.

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Related content in Mormon history:

Spencer W. Kimball diaries shine a light behind the scenes of modern Mormonism

Why Nauvoo still matters

 

How some Muslim and non-Muslim rappers alike embrace Islam’s greeting of peace

In many parts of the world, hip-hop has become a way for Muslim artists to assert their belonging and identity.

Phife and Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest perform in 1994. (Tim Mosenfelder/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

August 25, 2023

By 

Jeta Luboteni, Margarita Guillory

(The Conversation) — Ever since the United States’ “war on terror” began, American media has been rife with stereotypes of Muslims as violent, foreign threats. Advocates trying to push back against this characterization sometimes emphasize that “Islam means peace,” since the two words are derived from the same Arabic root.

Indeed, the traditional Muslim greeting “al-salamu alaykum” means “peace be upon you.” Some Americans were already familiar with the phrase, thanks to an unexpected source: hip-hop culture, which often incorporated the Arabic phrase.

This is but one example of Islam’s deep intertwining with the threads of hip-hop culture. In her groundbreaking book “Muslim Cool,” scholar, artist and activist Suad Abdul Khabeer shows how Islam, specifically Black Islam, was a crucial part of hip-hop’s roots – asserting the faith’s place in American life. From prayerlike lyrics to tongue-in-cheek references, Islam and other religions are woven into hip-hop’s beats.

That’s the focus of a class we teach at Boston University. One of us is a professor of religion, history and pop culture, while the other is a graduate student in Islamic Studies.

More than ‘hello’

In Muslim cultures, “al-salamu alaykum” is more than a way of saying hello. It points to the spiritual peace of submitting to God – and not only in this life. Saying “peace be upon you” is a prayer that God will grant heaven to the person with whom you are speaking. Many Muslims believe that “salam” is also the greeting heard upon entering heaven.

The Quran instructs Muslims that “when you are greeted with a greeting, respond with a better greeting or return it.” This means that the proper response to “al-salamu alaykum” is, at a minimum, to respond in kind: “wa alaykum al-salam.”

This exchange has been adapted by several rap artists – including Rick Ross, who does not identify as Muslim, and turns the phrase’s meaning on its head. Ross uses the greeting in the hook of his song “By Any Means,” referencing a famous speech by civil rights leader Malcolm X, who was a minister of the Nation of Islam for many years until shortly before his assassination. In 1964, Malcolm X declared African Americans’ right “to be respected as a human being … by any means necessary.”

Half a century later, Ross rapped,

By any means, if you like it or not
Malcolm X, by any means
Mini-14 stuffed in my denim jeans
Al-salaam alaykum, wa alaykum al-salaam
Whatever your religion kiss the ring on the Don

Ross’s use of the phrase, right after he mentions Malcolm X, appears to insinuate that if one wishes him peace, he will wish them the same. However, if one wishes him violence, he will not hesitate to respond in kind.

‘Peace to all my shorties’

Other hip-hop artists have used “al-salamu alaykum” in many different ways, including lyrics that show broader familiarity with the laws of Islam. For example, it is sometimes contrasted with pork, which is prohibited in Islam, and by extension, the police – the “pigs,” in derogatory slang – though it is more common for non-Muslim singers to use it in this way.

“Tell the pigs I say Asalamu alaikum,” Lil Wayne says in “Tapout,” a song that has little else to do with Islam. Joyner Lucas likewise raps, “I say As-salāmu ʿalaykum when I tear apart some bacon,” in the song “Stranger Things.” Combinations of the sacred and the profane are present throughout hip-hop, not limited to references to Islam.

Finally, many rappers, particularly those who are Muslim, use the greeting in a more straightforward manner. In their 1995 song “Glamour and Glitz,” A Tribe Called Quest raps:

Peace to all my shorties who be dying too young
Peace to both coasts and the land in between
Peace to your man if you're doing your thing
Peace to my peoples who is incarcerated
Asalaam alaikum means peace, don't debate it

Here they affirm and assert that the core of the greeting is one of peace and harmony – not only between people, but between all of God’s creations.

Shared identity

French Montana performs during the premiere of ‘For Khadija,’ a documentary about his family, at the 2023 Tribeca Festival.
Arturo Holmes/Getty Images for Tribeca Festival

But even if Muslims come in peace, society may not see them that way – and that experience of discrimination often comes through in some lyrics. Rapper French Montana, who immigrated to the Bronx – the birthplace of hip-hop – from Morocco, raps in his 2019 song “Salam Alaykum:”

As-salamu alaykum, 
That pressure don’t break, 
It don’t matter what you do, 
they still gon’ hate you

It’s a harsh recognition that whatever one’s actions, whether violent or peaceful, they may still result in racism – a realization he shares with some fellow Muslim rappers in Europe. A comedic take on this is done by Zuna and Nimo in their 2016 song “Hol’ mir dein Cousin,” where at the start of the song, Nimo states he has a shipment of “haze–” marijuana, but at the end of the video, it turns out the shipment is of “Hase–” bunnies. Yet, throughout the song the rappers speak about violence and drug trade, painting a conflicting picture of innocence versus guilt.

Fatima El-Tayeb, a scholar of race and gender, calls hip-hop a “diasporic lingua franca” in her 2011 book “European Others,” highlighting how an art form created by African Americans, and speaking to their experiences, has become one of the main ways minorities around the world speak about their struggles and successes. Some young Muslims in Europe, for example, use hip-hop as a key way to assert their sense of belonging in societies.

In hip-hop, “al-salamu alaykum” is not treated as though it were part of a foreign culture. These rappers’ beats create a space where it’s OK to be Muslim – a space in which Islam is not merely tolerated, but recognized as a valuable part of pop culture.

(Margarita Guillory, Associate Professor of Religion, Boston University. Jeta Luboteni, Ph.D. Student in Religion, Boston University. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

 Opinion

Sinead O’Connor was a rock star and a Muslim. Why did obituaries miss this?

Obscuring O’Connor’s faith is a missed chance to fight Islamophobia.

Irish musician Sinead O’Connor appears on “The Late Late Show” in Ireland in 2019. Video screen grab

August 8, 2023

By 

Anna Piela

(RNS) — Sinead O’Connor, the Irish singing star whose funeral was held Tuesday (Aug. 8) near Dublin, will always be connected with Roman Catholicism after she ripped a photo of Pope John Paul II in two on “Saturday Night Live” in 1992 to protest the church’s handling of sexual abuse by priests. The backlash dampened her success, and though she said she didn’t regret the moment, it defined her public image for the rest of her 56 years.

But the rites for her burial Tuesday were not Catholic but Muslim, and Sheikh Umar Al-Qadri, an Islamic scholar and the chief imam at the Islamic Center of Ireland, eulogized her as Shuhada Sadaqat, the name she took after converting to Islam. It’s not something the news media have reported much about, part of a seemingly willful ignorance that was more interested in her reputation as a rebellious and even sacrilegious celebrity.

For a long time, O’Connor’s relationship with religion was complicated. Many recent retrospectives, such as here and here, published after her death, comment on her spirituality. She was indeed repelled by much about religion, particularly inflexible religious labels. Yet she was constantly attracted to spirituality, and it powered her creative work. Her album “Theology” contains Hebrew Bible texts that she rearranged and set to music. In 2007, she declared that she had become a Rastafarian.

And she kept up her sometimes contentious conversation with Catholics. Tapping into the debate about women’s priesthood, she caused controversy in April 1999 when she announced she had become ordained as the first-ever priestess in the Latin Tridentine Church, a dissident Catholic group in her native Ireland. In 2019, she reflected on Catholic-dominated Ireland in an interview on “The Late Late Show”: “It was a very oppressed country, religiously speaking.”

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RELATED: Why some Muslim women feel empowered wearing hijab, a headscarf

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But O’Connor’s seeking phase ended when in 2018 she embraced Islam. What she told of that process was evocative of a statement I heard dozens of times from converts to Islam I interviewed for my book, “Wearing the Niqab: Muslim Women in the UK and the US.” In her interview on “The Late Late Show,” she said: “I had been a Muslim all my life and didn’t realize it. … I am home.”

This fact, that it was Islam that finally brought her peace, has been neglected entirely or treated as a footnote.

Her obituary in Vogue does not mention her Muslim faith at the time of her death but makes an obligatory note of the photo-tearing incident. The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Chicago Sun-Times all made only brief asides saying that she had converted and changed her name. (In its story today, The New York Times included more about her Muslim funeral.)

Her obituary in The Guardian, a British daily that usually aspires to be diversity-affirming, was puzzlingly insensitive when it came to noting her faith: “On her final concert tour, in 2019, she wore a hijab and abaya, but nothing else had changed — her voice still raised the hair on the back of the neck.”

Why would her voice or her talent change after conversion? Does the author imply that a Muslim woman would have less power as a performer? This statement feeds into prevalent stereotypes of Muslim women as silent and oppressed.

On its X (formerly Twitter) account, the Council on American-Islamic Relations argued that photos used in her obituaries — many of them pre-conversions photographs of O’Connor with bare arms and her head uncovered — would be counter to O’Connor’s adoption of a hijab and abaya.

Another CAIR post said, “We also urge the media to respect her acceptance of Islam by acknowledging the name she chose for herself, Shuhada’ Sadaqat, & using recent photos that depict how she chose to present herself.”

This sentiment was echoed by Khaled Beydoun, a prominent scholar of Islam: “Many Mainstream media outlets are overlooking or erasing Sinead — or Shahuda’s — Muslim identity.” (Another scholar of Islam, Amanullah De Sondy, points out that O’Connor’s gender-fluid identity is similarly being erased by the very same media outlets.)

O’Connor often used her birth name as a stage name, so using it for clarity is understandable. But to focus completely on her conflicted relationship with Catholicism oddly fails to explore what came after her entanglement with the religion of her homeland, and the religion that eventually brought her peace after a tumultuous faith journey.

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RELATED: Women seek diverse paths to leadership in Islamic spaces

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The obscuring of O’Connor’s Muslim faith by the mainstream media suggests that the Islamic faith is still seen as somehow incompatible with show business. Few Muslim female singers reach global fame on this scale, so it is disappointing that so few in the media saw O’Connor’s brilliant life as a chance to challenge Islamophobia. But more disappointing is that in remembering her, something so important as her religious agency — her religious choice, belief, practice and identity — was seen as an afterthought.

(Anna Piela, a visiting scholar in religious studies and gender at Northwestern University, is the author of “Wearing the Niqab: Muslim Women in the UK and the US.” She is also the senior writer at American Baptist Home Mission Societies and an ordained American Baptist Churches USA minister. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

 Opinion

Robbie Robertson, the Band, and a song of exile

I already miss Robbie Robertson of the Band. Ah, but there is one song....

August 9, 2023

By 

Jeffrey Salkin

Martini Judaism

My son and I have much in common, besides our facial features. One of those things is a love of rock music, and most particularly, a love of the Band, the classic 60s-70s mostly Canadian rock group.

Therefore, you can understand the poignant father/son moment that we shared when he texted me and told me that Robbie Robertson, the leader of the group, had died at the age of eighty years old.

Robbie Robertson was one of my musical heroes. He was a statesman of rock music, both as a member of the Band, and as a solo artist. He was eclectic and prolific. He composed and produced the soundtracks for such films as “Raging Bull,” “The King of Comedy,” “Casino,” and “The Departed,” among others. As a performer, he dripped with charisma, in ways that some have compared to Mick Jagger. Just watch “The Last Waltz” again, and you will see it.

How does Robbie Robertson make his way, posthumously, into this column?

First, because of his family story. His mother was Cayuga and Mohawk, raised on the Six Nations Reserve southwest of Toronto. His father was of Russian Jewish background, a gambler, killed in a hit and run accident. Robbie never met him, and only learned about him years later.

Was Robbie Robertson Jewish, or Jew-ish? His spirituality was rooted in the First Nation experience, and he loved that music and celebrated it. But, as you will see, there was something very Jewish inside him as well.

Take a tour with me through my Band collection (the Robertson solo material is also wonderful).

“The Weight” (love this version): This was their first hit, off the “Music From Big Pink” album (1968). I loved the album so much that I actually persuaded my parents to take a detour on a Catskills outing to find the Big Pink house.

“I pulled into Nazareth..” It begins with a biblical vision, and yes, Fannie has to deal with some kind of weight, and there are all sorts of murky and sketchy characters in the song. But, it turns out that the biblical Nazareth was actually Nazareth, Pennsylvania, the headquarters of Martin Guitars.

Greil Marcus, in “Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music,” took rock criticism to a whole new level — a level that few have attempted since he wrote that seminal book about the meaning of rock music in American life.

This is what he says about “The Weight:”

You don’t need to analyze the lyrics of “The Weight” to understand the burden Miss Fanny has dropped on the man who sings the song…We never find out who Miss Fanny is, let alone what the singer is supposed to do for her; but the music, not to mention the singing, is so full of emotion and complexity it makes “the weight”—some combination of love, debt, fear, and guilt—a perfect image of anyone’s entanglement.

As Gary A. Anderson writes in “Sin: A History,” in the Hebrew Bible, sin is sometimes imagined as a weight that must be borne; in fact, it is the Bible’s dominant metaphor for sin.

What is most striking is the frequency of the idiom “to bear [the weight of] a sin” within the Hebrew Bible; it predominates over its nearest competitor by more than six to one. For Hebrew speakers in the First Temple period, therefore, the most common means of talking about human sin was to compare it to weight.

“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” From “The Band” (1969). The story of Virgil Kane, who mourns the South’s defeat.

This song and I have a painful, complex history. My late father hated it: “What the hell are we doing, mourning the defeat of the South in the Civil War? They were traitors!” “Virgil, quick come see — there goes Robert E. Lee…” Robert E. Lee and his soldiers fought for an evil cause — the maintenance of slavery as a social and economic system.

Still, I set aside my discomfort with the song, because it’s just that good, and because I believe Greil Marcus when he writes:

“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” written for [the late] Levon [Helm], who sings it—is not so much a song about the Civil War as it is about the way each American carries a version of that event within himself…It is hard for me to comprehend how any Northerner, raised on a very different war than Virgil Kane’s, could listen to this song without finding himself changed.

“King Harvest (Has Surely Come).” From “The Band” (1969). Here we have one of the finest rock songs of the 1960s, IMHO. It is the narrative of a man who “works for the union, because she’s so good to me.” It is the song of the working class man in rural America, waiting for autumn to come across the fields as King Harvest, almost like an agricultural messianic figure.

Again, Greil Marcus:

In “King Harvest,” probably Robbie’s greatest song, we meet a man who might be Virgil Kane’s grandson—or our contemporary, you can’t tell. He works that same farm, but it fails and sends him into the bitter mills of the New South; when times are slow the mills shut down, and he runs into the arms of a union, hoping for one last chance. Yet wherever he is driven, he carries his roots with him like a conscience. He cannot escape the feel of the land any more than we can escape its myth.

I cannot listen to this song without crying.

“The Rumor” from “Stage Fright” (1970). I always thought that this song might have been about the Salem witchcraft trials, or about McCarthyism. 

Now when the rumor comes to your town

It grows and grows, where it started, no one knows.

Some of your neighbors will invite it right in.

Maybe it’s a lie, even if it’s a sin.

They’ll repeat the rumor again…

My favorite line, which I have adopted as a semi-mantra: “You can forgive, and you can regret, but can never, ever forget.”

But, for me, Robertson’s most powerful song is “Acadian Driftwood” from “Northern Lights-Southern Cross” (1975). It was influenced by Longfellow’s poem “Evangeline,” the story of the expulsion of the Acadians from Nova Scotia during the wars between the British and the French, and their long trek to Louisiana, where Cajun culture was born. Check out this video that combines the song with that history.

Why does this song move me so much?

It is not only one of Robertson’s finest compositions, both lyrically and musically. It is a song of exile, of what Jews call galut — of a displacement that is not only geographic, but a destruction of a world of meaning.

“How can we sing the LORD’s song in a strange land?” the Psalmist lamented. That singing of songs in strange lands is a human experience that many groups have shared, and it behooves us as Jews to hear all their stories (yes, even and especially that of the Palestinians).

Who better than Robbie Robertson, the product of two displaced peoples, to write such a song? Who better than a son of the First Nations and a Russian Jew?

This evening, I am loading up my Band playlists, and listening to them, and smiling, and crying.

May the blessing of Jaime Robert Robertson be an eternal blessing.

Quoting one of the Band’s song: “When you awake, you will remember everything.”

I sure will. I always will.