Appearance at the expense of reality, as a gesture to obscure and deny reality? Rather in the context of post-modernism, the society of the spectacle, where we give up on external as well as internal reality, treating the two of them as mere codified appearance, a cultural code, one among many, and this of no particular consequence , that simply works to tease out some inherent esthetics, part of a process that acknowledges alienation and dehumanization that can be distilled as an expression of our psychotic society, the spectacle of self , and the emotional detachment and estrangement from the perception of self: as if one were performing in a theater piece or surveillance of one’s gestural and mental activity from without and beyond the ken of understanding and articulation giving credence to the notion that we live in fantasy and not reality, and are unable to distinguish them…
(see link at end)…A reader brings this picture to our attention, allegedly of an Orthodox man flying from Cyprus who sealed himself in plastic for the duration of the flight. While this seems like an effective way to guard oneself against the Contagion-level germ count on airplanes, we’re told it’s likely because he’s a descendant of the biblical Kohanim, and adhering to a shockingly strict interpretation of ancient laws regarding contact with the dead.
—According to Haaretz: “Rabbi Yosef Shalom Eliashiv, the leader of the Lithuanian Haredi community in Israel, published a halakhic ruling in the past stipulating that Cohens mustn’t fly… because they are prohibited from flying over a cemetery.
“Later, Rabbi Eliashiv found a solution to this issue, ruling that wrapping oneself in thick plastic bags while the plane crossed over the cemetery is permissible.”
Indeed, there seems to be some precedent for holy men attempting to travel in plastic bags to and from Israel.
In 2001, El Al Airlines decided not to allow ultra-Orthodox Jews of priestly descent to “hermetically seal themselves in plastic bags when flying over the Holon cemetery in order to avoid ritual impurity.—click image for source…
Apparently, since all planes fly over cemeteries, this is an advised method of spiritual protection. About.com’s Judaism page (a questionable source, we know) explains:
A kohen initially was not supposed to approach any dead body, and if he did so he became ritually impure (tameh). There were rituals that could be employed in ancient days to restore him to ritual purity, but that is no longer possible.
The fact is that all of us have sat on a chair where there was a dead fly, been in a building where there was a deceased animal, etc. Thus, we are all ritually impure, including the Kohanim.Read More:http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/04/12/orthodox-jew-covers-plastic-bag-plane-remain-pure-cemetery-picture_n_3067344.html?view=print
—Inside a circular bag, a refuge from being unable to internalize the over-mediated. Is the man on the plane just another member of the society of the spectacle, someone preferring appearance to reality, or celebrating experience at the expense of reality. Being robbed as it were, like Bruegels The Misanthrope above…
There is a plausible argument that religion, as it manifests itself, particularly when it ventures into the political realm, can be deeply compromised by an intolerance that can give the impression of being intrinsic. Even faith can be perceive as being intolerant if it associates illusion that its case is identical to the case of god, identical values, thereby those of others are less tolerable, less superior. The risk of playing god and the fine line between playing religion and ending up playing god which defeats the purpose since god becomes personalized and de-personalized with a near agnostic aura that places any mysticism into the known. If Freud can become a crutch, and Marxism, and rationalism,then why not religion as well?
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