The area in which these two humanists grew up was a very isolated jewish community.  Both are from very traditional, fundamentalist Jewish families, and had never heard of humanism while growing up.  So how did they find their way to a huge humanist conference?

Leah had come across Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion.  She read it, fell in love with it, and wrote to Dawkins explaining how much the book meant to her.  She explained the journey it had taken her on, and how she had come from such a traditional background.  In a letter in return, Dawkins told her about Greg Epstein and the work he was doing at Harvard.  From there, she found out about the New Humanism conference, and it was a natural choice to make plans to go.

In the meantime, Paul went out and bought his own copy of The God Delusion.  Leah laughed at this, saying he could have borrowed hers, but he defended himself, saying "I have to have my own bible." While he doesn't know yet if he agrees with everything the book says, he knows he doesn't have the courage to be so definitive about it.  He says it's wonderful to hear someone say it aloud.  

Though their eyes, the conference was fantastic and, at times, shocking.  Paul explains that he's so used to the ideas he embraces being shunned by his community that seeing them as the mainstream was foreign.  Leah adds that, as far as humanism is concerned, "we've been in a little backwater.  This is everybody; this is what we believe in."  "I love to be in this environment where I am surrounded by likeminded progressive individuals; to not be an outcast because of my beliefs," says Paul.

That backwater Leah mentioned is a small group of freethinkers deep in New York City, isolated from other groups or larger umbrella organizations.  They feel isolated from the entire movement, and a lot of their members have gone through a lot of extremes to get where they are today.  Rabbi Sherwin T. Wine, a speaker at the conference, had made a joking reference to humanists as being "scarred" by religion.  But Leah says that in their case, it is neither a joke nor an exaggeration.  "Some of us have been literally tortured, and have gone through really painful situations because of our beliefs."  She points out that there are a lot of people at the conference with a similar background, and that being called "wounded" by fellow humanists isn't a nice feeling.

Paul describes his schooling as an example.  "I went to a school where I would get slapped pretty badly if I spoke anything but Yiddish – a specific dialect.  If I spoke another dialect (which, he later admits, he sometimes deliberately did), I would get slapped."  For him, the language has a lot of associations.  Leah brought up the music by the Yiddish Community Chorus of the Workmen's Circle at the ceremony for Salman Rushdie the previous evening.  "It brought me to tears. Yiddish is a language that represents a lot of chauvinism and repressions, so to hear it as this sort of refuge was like 'What's going on?'"

Paul found a touching moment in Rushdie's reading from Shalimar the Clown.  The main character has been declared dead by her village and is being treated as such.  She shouts out, asking if a dead person can get food and shelter from a storm, and Paul says that those questions rang with him.  "There have been times when I have felt dead to my family."    He admits that his family cannot rise above their tradition in the same way that the main character's family could not either.  He finishes, "It was really touching to hear someone else yell out those same things."

 

 

This article originally appeared in the SSA eMpirical No. 20 - June 2007.