איתי

שבוע טוב Shavuah tov!

Colleen & Friends

Tonight, I listened to one of my favorite podcasts on iTunes, Compassionate Cooks. The podcaster is Colleen Patrick-Goudreau. Now, normally, I listen to Bob and Jenna's Vegan Freaks podcast. Both young professors at a college in upstate NY, they are irreverent, tattooed punk freaks. I first heard Colleen when she did a segment on their show in late September 2006. She is kind of a polar opposite: reverent, thoughtful and gentle. I don't know why the contrast between Vegan Freaks and Compassionate Cooks made me think of the Joni Mitchell lyric in the subject line. Anyway, in an episode called, "Being a Joyful Vegan" Colleen reads this short essay by Robert Bass:

If you look at a photographic negative, the colors are reversed, nothing seems quite as it should, and the image may be unrecognizable. Once you see the picture developed, you recognize the face of your best friend.

That’s a bit like a common impression of vegans. We don’t eat dead animals. Or their products. Pork and beef, seafood and fowl are out. So are milk and cheese, eggs and caviar. And it doesn’t stop with what we don’t eat. We try to avoid leather and wool and fur. We don’t use them to cover our bodies or our furniture or our floors. It sounds like a long list of negatives, of don’ts: Thou shalt not this; thou shalt not that. Why would anybody want that?

You get a better picture by reversing the colors, developing the negative. The incomprehensible prohibitions turn out to be the boundaries of something positive, visible in its true colors and proper proportions. Instead of a list of don’ts, we see an abundance of healthy, delicious foods, with plenty of options for home and clothes and personal care. We do not grudgingly practice a creed of self-denial. We select from an embarassment of riches.

But that is still just a flat, two-dimensional picture instead of the solid, three-dimensional reality. At the heart of being vegan is a kind of compassionate awareness. We share this planet not only with billions of fellow human beings, but also with uncounted billions upon billions of other creatures, with lives, wants, enjoyment and suffering as real as our own. Humans have had and used the power to crowd them out, push them aside, sometimes driving them to extinction, and often, making them into tools for our use, servitors of our desires, food for our tables, clothes for our backs. As vegans, we look, we pay attention, we see the unnecessary suffering imposed on our fellow creatures. We respond in compassion, refusing to pretend that might makes right, refusing to turn away and ignore what we know. The vegan message is ultimately very simple:

Look. Pay attention. See the unnecessary death and suffering. We don’t have to contribute or help to keep it going. We can stop being a part of this. And so, that’s what we try to do.

Dr. Robert Bass is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Coastal Carolina University. He specializes in ethics and game theory, and is especially interested in moral questions relating to the environment and our treatment of animals

As was pointed out to me, poke, poke (thanks for noticing, Matan! ~ and, BTW, the photo above was for you and Jordy) I haven't been posting much lately. This past week, I finished the last class of the last course for my degree, so I was busy wrapping things up. That sounds so final, when the truth is, I still have another year of writing ahead. Then, what?

These last few unplugged Shabbats have really been wonderful. It reminds me of the power of Shabbat to nuture us when we choose to enter that oasis of time. (My dear Beth sent me a book by Abraham Joshua Heschel when I was in the Peace Corps). I feel like I'm on the cusp of big changes ahead. I'm curious about the ways people live and the role of choice. What allows someone to be able to continue to look deeply at her life and make choices that demand of her that she make changes that may lead her temporarily (?) way out of her comfort range? From where does that wisdom spring? If necessity is indeed the mother of invention, what opens our eyes to see past our conventions and habits, allowing us to recognize that need and consider new options? Is it seeing clearly that gives us the strength of our convictions? Do we just hot foot it from a situation that becomes intolerable to the next pause of comfort? In Shobogenzo, Dōgen Zenji has a chapter about home-leaving called Shukke (出家). These days, it's easy enough to change your religion, change your diet, board a plane and move to another country, leave your friends, leave your partner ~ leave your home. How do we find home? How do we make that radical choice, that committment?

A good week to all!
Itai

Tags: abraham joshua heschel, beth!, bob and jenna torres, colleen patrick-goudreau, dogen, matan & jordi, robert bass, shobogenzo, vegan podcasts
Current Music: Shostakovich: 24 Preludes and Fugues, Opus 87

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