Rediscovering My Judaism—in Africa

[rug]

I went to Ghana to study drumming. But I learned much more about the religion I’d cast aside, including how to reclaim it.



The author and his wife Ingrid on their honeymoon in Ghana. (Photo courtesy of Alexander Gelfand)

May 16, 2016 • 12:00 AM
By Alexander Gelfand

Just after we got married in 1997, my wife Ingrid and I traveled to Ghana on an extended musical honeymoon, to study a style of traditional West African drumming performed by an ethnic group known as the Akan. Four years earlier, while still single, I’d joined a drumming troupe in Toronto made up of Akan immigrants, led by master drummer Kwame Obeng. Before he returned to Ghana, Kwame invited me to train with him there, where he led a royal drumming ensemble in the court of an Akan chief. A few years later, I met Ingrid, a professional percussionist who was as excited to go as I was.

While we stayed in Ghana for four months, the honeymoon ended almost immediately—and not just because we both got sick. (Ingrid suffered a near-fatal case of amoebic dysentery, while I acquired something that looked suspiciously like malaria.) The rhythms we were expected to play with the royal drummers—at funerals and festivals, for massive crowds of dancers and chiefs—were fiendishly difficult, and neither Ingrid nor I could figure them out at first, resulting in a lengthy series of botched performances and public humiliations.

But if the drumming proved challenging, it was the locals’ religious practices that were the most difficult for us to endure. Little did I know that these rituals—some of them too bloody for us to watch—would have a profound effect on me, bringing me back to the Judaism I’d cast aside years before.

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As a child, I attended an Orthodox Jewish day school, went to Saturday morning services, and idolized the rabbis at my family’s synagogue in Montreal, picturing them in my mind’s eye as cartoon superheroes who wore yarmulkes and tallitot rather than capes and masks. My understanding of Judaism wasn’t terribly sophisticated, and I accepted most of what I was taught—the stories of miracles and divine intervention, of Joshua at the battle of Jericho and Jonah in the belly of the whale—as God’s own truth.'

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/201834/rediscovering-my-judaism-in-africa

[jonno99]

1. Thanks for posting this. I found these paragraphs worthy of note:

With all due respect to Richard Dawkins, I have moved away from the idea that science and religion are necessarily incompatible and toward the position that they are different yet complementary ways of apprehending the world—each concerned with its own realm, each with its own strengths and limitations.

For example, I’m now willing to view the tales I was taught in Hebrew school as metaphors to be plumbed for meaning, rather than as mere claptrap; and although the anthropomorphic, personal God of the Old Testament still seems to me a rather naïve, childlike concept, as Einstein himself put it, I now describe myself as an agnostic, as both he and Darwin did at the ends of their lives, rather than as an unabashed atheist. While my faith in understanding physical reality through rational, empirical means remains unshaken, I’m prepared to accept more ineffable forms of experience as well, and to acknowledge that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in any single philosophy.