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Last update - 00:00 28/10/2008
Voting as a religious experience
By Bradley Burston
Tags: elections, Israel News 

Click here for more from Bradley Burston


JERUSALEM - I am in awe of this thing called voting. There is not a single human activity quite like it.
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It is, in a profound sense, a religious experience.

I am in Jerusalem this morning, more than 7,000 miles from my assigned polling place in California. I am voting by absentee ballot. I am stalled in a line in a fluorescent-lit Israeli post office the color of a faded manila folder, waiting to ship my wife's ballot and my own by overnight mail.

By rights, I should feel next to nothing. The man in front of me is bored as lead. He is here to pay his electricity and phone bills. The woman behind me has a stack of perhaps 80 addressed unstamped envelopes.

I should be bored as well. Yet I am here to vote, and the skin of my hand is tingling where I hold the papers, my pulse elevated, my eyes wide of their own volition.

When I get to the clerk, he notices that I am holding two sealed envelopes with nothing written on them.

"Ballots," I tell him in Hebrew. "Voting. For the United States. The election. The President." Having read the voter instructions, and, fearing disqualification over a technicality, having read them twice more, I place each unmarked ballot envelope and an accompanying declaration of identity into separate mailing envelopes, seal them, and hand them to the clerk.

I expect him to roll his eyes, or avert them. But he feels it too, this peculiar charged air, this overarching grace. He looks at the envelopes as if they hold a power of their own. And they do.

"Kol Hakavod. B'hay'yai," pronounces the clerk, suddenly animated, the meaning of his words pitched somewhere between Congratulations and Well Done.

When you break it down, there is little in the act of voting that differs from the most pedestrian of bureaucratic errands. Yet there is something hugely humbling in this, something very close to the feeling of the Fear of God. There is majesty to it, and devotion and the palpable sense of affecting, if only in a small way - but directly - the world's course.

Ours is an age of congenital cynicism. As a result, all too many of us are spiritual cripples. Our faith in the future, our love of country, our belief in the worth of doing good and promoting the general welfare have been gutted by a culture that venerates nastiness over nobility, glitz over substance.

Reality shows now serve as our moral compass, instructing us in the new catechism: Excellence is suspect, a threat, a vote off the island. Cooperation and what used to be called citizenship is suspect, as well. Altruism? Extinct.

Even for the true believer, organized religion, and for that matter, alternatives such as free markets, welfare states, global conglomerates, new media, advanced technology and sophisticated cults, have proven decidedly mixed blessings. The exhaustion of belief has yielded the Age of Whatever.

Still, there is something about voting that overpowers alienation and chronic disappointment and cosmopolitanism and cool.

Every entry into a polling booth, every look at a new ballot, holds something of the titillation and terror of a first date.

It is the Olympics made accessible for everyman. It is the heavens brought down, for one brief moment, close enough to touch.

This is what genuine religion is all about - a quietly fanatical faith in the power of ordinary people to do the extraordinary, and, using objects as workaday as paper and pencils, to redirect history.

And, in the process - whether in a well-ordered, hushed, disciplined and supervised polling place or in some grumpy, unruly queue in a disheveled foreign post office - to know for one truly brief moment, what religion so often promises and so seldom delivers: a state of grace.


__________________________



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  1.   Mysticism in voting 19:23  |  Bronxite11 28/10/08
  2.   Voter rage 13:03  |  Joe 29/10/08
  3.   misguided religion 14:27  |  albert paul ortiz 29/10/08
  4.   Lightly touch-tickling the democratic rights 14:53  |  allang 29/10/08
  5.   albert paul ortiz of fullerton, california @#3 16:56  |  Akiva P 29/10/08
  6.   Reply to Akiva: B of R and D of I 18:46  |  Joseph 29/10/08
  7.   Akiva P # 5 The Abbreviations 18:52  |  Jeff Northridge 29/10/08
  8.   It is just a civic responsibility 18:59  |  Mark Lincoln 29/10/08
  9.   bradley burston 08:20  |  kushelevitch 30/10/08
  10.   Sarah Palin Is Too Good Looking To Be Vice-President 04:49  |  Yosemite 31/10/08
  11.   I Haven`t Lost Hope 08:51  |  Yosemite 31/10/08
  12.   Bradley I Don`t Know Where To Post This 08:06  |  Yosemite 03/11/08
  13.   Burston`s vote 10:40  |  Robert Mabbutt 03/11/08
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