Saints Preserve You!

More updates on the panties-at-the-pilgrimage-site story.

Miriam at Bloghead has another take on the Amukah underwear abandonment.

Miriam writes of the 'gullible women' abandoning underthings at the grave of Yonatan ben Uziel "All of which just goes to show once again how quickly it's possible to slip from religion to superstition to sacrilege."

And right here on Balabusta in Blue Jeans, Barefoot Jewess writes "I also find it so incredibly sad that women are that desperate that they will do anything for a match, including something so immodest. I smell desperation and not too much dignity. I wonder if the Rav would think that was worth blessing."

This story interests me a lot, and I didn't have a negative reaction to it at all. My immediate reaction was that it was charming. My next reaction was to spend a while online, hunting for pictures of Amukah, and reading up on Rabbi Yonatan's accomplishments.

Since no one in the immediate blogosphere seems to share my reaction, I spent a little time wondering where it came from, and why I respond to this story in the way I do (which might be best summed up as "Go ladies! Go, Rabbi Yonatan! Rock on!)

First, of course, I'm Irish-American with deep Catholic roots on my father's side of the family. Saints come with the territory, as does an understanding of the importance of ritual, whether or not you half believe in everything you're doing any more than half the time. (Sorry, this subject makes me talk like Andrew Greeley.)

I know dozens of people, my grandmother included, who were annoyed and unsettled by the removal of Saint Christopher from the Vatican's official calendar of the saints. Christopher is the patron saint of, among other things, drivers of cars, buses, and cabs, transit workers of all kinds, travellers and sailors, and protects against lightning, hailstorms, flood, sudden death and the toothache. Also surfers, which makes him an important saint in Southern California. (I mean he protects surfers, not protects against surfers. That wasn't quite clear.) The Second Vatican Council revised him out of the calendar, on the thin and shaky grounds that he may have no historical existence. My grandmother, who credits him with her success at teaching two children to drive on the freeway without incident, is unimpressed with this kind of logic.

Ireland is dotted with wells, stones, and Neothlithic mounds that are still used in various rituals, as they have been for a looooooong time. Many/most of these locations are now associated with Catholic saints.

I'm being lighthearted about this, but the role of the saints is a serious issue. In the Irish language, you greet someone (sometimes in a sort of memory-game form), by wishing that God and Mary and Joseph and Brigid and Christopher and all the saints...the old people can go on for a while past that...will all be with you.

And I LIKE this sort of thing. I am not much of a rationalist, or a theologian. I believe in symbol and story as an adequate and elegant way of forming an understanding of things beyond human understanding. I don't much care if you call it superstition.

I have never liked the drive in Judaism to insist that only what is rational and theologically sound is Jewish. (Even less do I like people who insist that what is superstitious is halakhically necessary, so make of that what you will.) When I started to dig into layers of Jewish tradition--tekhines and segulot and saints' tombs--that echoed my other tradition, I liked them. Does liking equal believing, or taking with complete seriousness? No. But I do like them. I think they're important. I think they're an inheritance, a kind of experiential midrash.

When I hear about the panties at Amukah, I think of women in the Irish countryside dipping in holy wells to get pregnant--and when I think of that, I think of Chassidic stories about women conceiving after secretly dipping in wells in Soviet Russia. Can these things be harmful? Can they be turned against those who believe in them? Yes. They shouldn't be. They can. But I also can't help thinking that leaving your panties on ben Uziel's tomb reflects something--a deep desire--that maybe can't be expressed in forty words or less on JDates. And a sense of connection that infuriates unsympathetic rabbis who can't control it. But a man who devotes his afterlife to making matches should understand what's in the heart of a woman hanging her bra on a tree to find her true love.