The many gods of monotheism

I'm traveling, and last week's dominant experience has been the many gods of monotheism. The Egyptologist Jan Assmann has pointed out very convincingly that monotheism is defined less by "belief in one god" than by the attempt to draw a sharp and impermeable boundary between religious truth (the one true God, one's own one of course) and error (paganism and idolatry, a.k.a. whatever is sacred to everybody else). It will not come as a suprise that Twilight Traveler has some problems with such black-whitism (or light-darkism). The irony is that these boundaries invariably turn out to be grey zones, through which monotheists travel to the other side without ever leaving their own territory, and without realizing that they moved at all. Last week in Germany I participated in a beautiful ritual of the (originally Brasilian) Santo Daime community, which blends Roman Catholicism with Amazonian shamanism, and effortlessly combines a firm conviction of having the true doctrine (received by their founder, a rubber tapper known as mestre Ireneu, under the influence of their central sacrament ayahuasca) with an all-inclusive universalism that sincerely wishes love & light to all. Just a few days later I found myself in the city of Meron, close to Safed in Israel, being almost pressed to pulp in the midst of the hustle and bustle of the Lag B'omer festivities, when chassidim noisily celebrate the dying day of rabbi Shimon ben Yochai, the supposed author of the Zohar (the classic text of medieval kabbalah). And still the same evening I was sitting in the front row of a meeting of the Kabbalah Center (of Madonna fame), a New Age upgrade of kabbalah created by a rabbi Berg, his wife and their sons, who were all there, dancing ecstatically together with the public, to the music of a Jiddish rock band (see photo below). And if that were not enough, today in Jerusalem I visited the Western wall during shabbat - as solemn and moving as the Lag B'omer feasting had been chaotic and, frankly, aggressive - while the very same morning I had been watching with very mixed feelings how Christian tourists (one of them had a t-shirt that said "property of Jesus") were moving like bees through the "Holy Sepulchre" church in the old city. Unceasingly, visitors were sitting down to touch the "stone of unction'' with their hands or hold objects or family photos against it: although the stone dates from the early 19th century, they seemed convinced that it was connected to Jesus' body and must emit some kind of healing vibration. My Israeli friend Jonatan felt differently: he heard the singing of the monks and just could not bring himself to cross the treshold to that church, least of all on shabbat. I understood his feelings.