Aaron+Riley

Hi.

I'm a senior with a Creative Writing major and History minor. My interest in writing began when I was very young, though on the surface it was more about music. I was home schooled and part of our education was learning about the great classical composers. Through reading about their musical passion I began to develop my own musical abilities, mostly in singing, guitar, and piano.

From there I developed an interest in all the arts with a noticeable leaning towards all things classic. As I got a little older I began to read classic novels, but the work that really hooked me was //Lord of the Rings//. I began writing poetry and songs, and tampering with laughable narratives that at the time I believed were truly inspired. At the community college where I earned my associate's degree, I set out for film, but found that my academic writing and nonfiction essays showed promise. When I got to UCA, one semester in the film department firmly decided for me that I would be pursuing a career as a writer, not a director of independent films.

My main passion is fiction, but I have decided to gain as much knowledge and skill with nonfiction and technical writing as I can for the sake of avoiding the fate of the starving artist (a lifestyle I'd be ready and willing to live were it not for getting hit with falling in love, marriage, and a baby to be born in the coming weeks.)

I look forward to getting to know you all through your writing and learning together what it is to be good at the craft.

//Workshop Essay 1//

=**Peace Like A River**=

**Edge of the Sun**
The room is simple and humble - meager, like an old grandpa draped in his familiar, worn out sweater and capped by his fedora (adding just the right touch). All around is the faint scent of mildew, old paint, and Glade air fresheners. And sweat. Bodies racked in violent ecstasy dance just beyond the wall. Their footfalls thunder on the plush carpeting which blankets the creaking ﬂoorboards. The haunting chants come echoing forth from the mystical chamber beyond, like an army of desert shamans canting tunes of spellbinding enchantments.

This is a weekly service at the “ultra-orthodox” Jewish synagogue in Little Rock, Arkansas, and I am attending. Though Iʼm not technically Jewish, the past six years of my life have been spent learning Jewish laws and trying to apply them in my every day life. My beliefs have slowly migrated from one religion to another, though, again, Iʼve yet to become a true Jew. Even so, non-Jews are permitted to attend synagogue service. I am ﬁnally entering directly into the Jewish social psyche and have been granted permission to partake and contribute.

My hand lightly brushes the grain of the wooden door—it creaks open. The sickly smell of perspiration and dust comes wafting out, ﬁlling my nostrils and choking my lungs. The men stand tall: like a grove of olive trees grouped together in an otherwise desolate wasteland. Their garments paint a picture of simplicity and modesty: black, wide-rimmed hats, black overcoats, black slacks, and stubby white fringes hanging just at their sides, a Biblical mandate that identiﬁes them as Jews and reminds them of their obligation to their entire moral and ethical code known as the Torah. The number of men is signiﬁcant: without ten religious Jewish men, there is no religious quorum, and the full service cannot be performed—the sacriﬁces of prayer cannot be offered in full. Providence has pulled them together, like droplets of water coalescing into a pool. Today the prayers will be offered, like a river at its highest velocity, the water at its spilling point.

Stepping tentatively into the room, I walk softly to my seat. No head turns, no soul is stirred. The spiritual trance holds fast. The men spin around and around, like whirling dervishes or tornados in an open ﬁeld. Their arms ﬂail about in the stale air, their hands clap to the tune they chant in unison. Their language—otherworldly, supernatural— melodically drifts from their mouths. The world they create with their roaring voices is composed of Psalms: holy script offered up as a sweet aroma to their Maker.

Hiding behind my chair, I watch as the rabbi—a robust man with a thick black sponge of a beard—shufﬂes from foot to foot, keeping time with the song of worship. His back is to the crowd as he focuses all of his might, all of his “self”, on the Invisible One to Whom he sings. Like a reed swaying in the breeze, the rabbi sets the pace for all of us. His ﬁst pounds the podium from which he leads the prayer service, sounding the gong of a Temple which no longer stands—except in the minds and hearts of the people, and in the memorial known as the synagogue.

As the leaderʼs hand beats unyielding, more rigorous, against the pillar at the head of the room, the dancing picks up and the singing grows louder. The end of the prayer is nearing, and my heartʼs thumping is increasing in intensity, matching the tempo of the metronome of the rabbiʼs right hand. All around the air becomes electriﬁed with the Spirit of the acolytes and the blood in our veins. The proverbial heifer is being slaughtered as we offer up the ﬁnal words.

And then: the atom splits—the river plummets in a waterfall. The prayer plateaus and spiritual euphoria is achieved. Standing on a solitary mountaintop overlooking a plain of tranquil satisfaction, the union with the Creator is felt by each and every one of us in the room, and for a brief moment in a lifetime of struggle and pain, sorrow and death, we are all just content with existing. Though we daily dwell in caves of piercing darkness with ﬂashes of light to guide us home, in this instant we stand at the edge of the Sun, its rays enshrouding us in warmth and light.

The service continues from here with our covenantal duty to study the teachings of our G-d (hyphenated to protect against profaning a name or title of the Almighty). But none of us will forget the beauty we all beheld in a realm of existence not normally known to us in the everyday common experience. That beauty we beheld was G-d.

**In The Beginning**
I was brought up Southern Baptist in rural Arkansas, in the small community of Runyan Acres, the namesake of the church I attended. My mother—a devout woman who grew out of her ﬂower child persona into the lady of faith my grandmother raised her to be— taught me about the Bible and the Christian community on the whole. She made sure my ass was faithfully in a pew every Sunday, and during the secular days of the week, she kept my life squeaky clean of the spiritual pollution of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. (That didnʼt stop me from head-banging to death metal as I got a little older.)

My father, on the other hand, seemed completely devoid of any spirituality. All he talked about—on the rare occasion when he shared with us any sort of insight into his thoughts and feelings—was sports, work, and retiring by the age of 40. The rest of my family, both immediate and extended, were also devout right-wing conservatives and offered their constant moral support (and input) in my upbringing.

Kept at home during the day for education from Christian curriculum, I had much leisure time at my disposal—I was done with my school day within three hours of sitting down to it, because unlike public schoolers, I could work straight through the texts and their accompanied assignments. During these many hours of freedom/boredom, I studied the Bible like a good Christian child. Reading through chapter after chapter, book after book of Old and New Testaments, I learned about teachings my Sunday school teachers never taught me. And when asked about said teachings, they had no explanation to offer up. I began to become self-amused and self-impressed with my knowledge, and began to mock the average pastor for spending more time on anecdotes about baseball and ﬁshing trips, opposed to Scripture, as applicable to the central message of their sermons. Confused and distraught over the material I covered, I trudged endlessly on through the Scripture in my dimly-lit room, sometimes late into the evening. During one of these sessions, I stumbled upon what I believed was a revelation: the very nature of the G-d portrayed in the Bible is explained through the laws He gave His people, ancient Israel.

“That old law is dead and done away with, cruciﬁed with Christ on the cross. Weʼre free gentiles now,” they preached and pounded from the pulpit, ranting that to be in a relationship with the biblical G-d, one must walk like a right-wing Christian conservative, talk like a Capitalist American, and—generally speaking—live like a non-Jew. “After all,” the Church says, “you arenʼt a Jew—youʼre a Gentile.”

Wisdom from the cosmos. My ﬁrst retort was simply, “Jesus was a Jew.” But what does that really mean? What is it to be Jewish, and how did that apply to me, a Gentile? Itʼs a debate that has been fought out with words and swords since the beginning of Christianity, though since the advent of the monopoly of the Roman Catholic Church, it has been mostly sub-surface. But it was (brieﬂy) revived during the Protestant Reformation, and it //has// continued among some circles.

Reading the epistles of Paul, the words of the Old Testament prophets, and the teachings of Jesus Christ himself, I found myself again and again to the same resounding conclusion: Jewish Law (the Torah) applies to anyone who wishes to serve the G-d of the Bible. I could quote all the passages that bear this idea out, but Iʼm not here to preach. If youʼre interested, do the homework. Thatʼs what I did. Anytime I brought up these ideas to my Christian friends, they got shot down—like a baby bird leaving the nest for the ﬁrst time who doesn't make it farther than from the nest to the ground. So I swept it under the subconscious of my mind. But how could I pretend to believe something I didnʼt, lying to everyone around me— lying to myself? I was confused and conﬂicted in every area of life. I knew what I believed, but I had no idea of how to mesh those Jewish beliefs with my very non- Jewish heritage.

I found my way to a—surprise!—Southern Baptist church in Cabot, Arkansas, where my older sister and brother-in-law were attending. It was here that the question was posed to me by a Sunday School teacher:

“What is sin?” he asked me matter-of-factly one Sunday morning.

“Anything that displeases G-d, I suppose,” I answered hesitantly.

He shot me a wry look, as if to telepathically tell me I had just given a pat answer. After the delayed reaction of sitting back and contemplating the question, feeling a little embarrassed, I began to think back to the thoughts of my childhood, resurrecting the hypothesis hidden deep within the sanctuary of my long-term memory. This in turn led me once more to the pages of the Bible, to search out and uncover the mysteries of the Torah and the exigency of observing its statutes. Was this what it meant to please G-d? Inversely, if this were true, then was it displeasing to G-d to live contrary to the Torah? Is this what sin is?

Ironically, it was through this Sunday School teacher that a met a young man about my age who believed what I was positing. I was surprised and bemused to learn that he had been living in accordance with the Torah for the past few years of his life. After many hours of debate with him, still feeling uncertain of the solution to this spiritual conundrum, I decided I needed assistance in understanding the meaning of all of these questions. And that one pressing question, the greatest hindrance of all: exactly what does it mean to keep the Torah?

He gave me contact information for one Yaakov (Hebrew for Jacob and James/”Jim”), a non-Jew who had been living as a Jew for nearly a decade and a half. The man, who had studied the Torah for much longer than he had been living it, was a leader in a congregation of men and women who shared this same view who identiﬁed themselves as part of the world of Messianic Judaism. Messianic Judaism, as I was informed, began with Jewish people who came to believe Jesus was in fact the promised Messiah and in turn believed in the New Testament claims and teachings. Since its birth, however, the balance of the scales has tipped in the favor of non-Jewish believers, who have transformed their lives to look more Jewish, sound more Jewish, and act more Jewish, all in the name of following their Messiah in the traditional disciple relationship of servant-emulates-master. Yaakov and I shared a brief exchange of emails to get acquainted, after which he invited me to his home to discuss the matter in person. I loaded up my car and set out, anticipating that my life would be forever changed.

Driving for an hour or so down winding back roads, unpaved and unattended, I came to a big iron gate, behind which stood a small wooden building standing in front of an old trailer. The place resembled a cult gathering, a haven for those who reject society and whom society in turn rejects. There, on the low porch of the building, stood a man of large proportions, not overly pudgy but tall and powerfully built. His white beard hung long and ﬂowing down to his stomach. Dressed in nice black slacks, a plaid button-up shirt neatly tucked in, with a Jewish prayer shawl (a tallit, pronounced “tah-LEET”) loosely wrapped around his broad shoulders and a kippah/yarmulke (a Jewish manʼs headcover). The monumental man was analogous to a Jewish St. Nick.

He motioned to a spot to park my vehicle, then turned and entered the building, leaving me to follow his lead. I hesitantly followed. It was humble, nearly vacant—almost like a ghost town. Tables were lined out in the center of the room in three rows. There was a small table at the front of the room, where the elder sat during Sabbath services every Saturday. There was a dry erase board that spanned the length of the front wall behind the teacherʼs desk where ideas and thoughts were written or drawn out as a teaching aid. Everything—the walls, the ﬂoor, the ceiling—was wood (or the color thereof), giving the place a very earthy, humble appearance. On the walls hung tapestries with Hebrew script and Jewish images on them.

He sat down behind a laptop computer, with Scripture and informational programs opened and ready for reference. We sat and talked late into the evening, discussing our pasts, acquainting ourselves with one another. He told me of his former career as a criminal investigator; of his formerly-held position in the Church of Christ as a Sunday school superintendent and pastor-in-training; of his years in service to a “crazed” rabbi (as most people perceived him) who lived in the deserts of Israel. He related to me the intricacies of the Torah, the teachings and musings of the ancient sages of Judaism, and showed me what I already knew was contained in the standard versions of the Bible.

"I've seen things," he said, his tone serious and his eyes as wide as a full moon. "Strange things. Things that can't be explained naturally. Are you familiar with the Bible codes?"

"I am," I responded. He was referring to the Hebrew version of the Torah, the version that has been intricately copied all over the world, wherever a large Jewish presence has been, for thousands of years. A Hebrew letter is selected from a word—any word— in the Torah. Then, several letters are skipped, and another letter is selected. Whatever the distance between these two letters in terms of the letters between them, that same number of letters is skipped continuing in the same direction (whether forwards, backwards, up, down, or diagonal) leading to a new letter. This is done all throughout the Torah, and a strange phenomenon begins to present itself: within one section of Scripture, using this method of ﬁnding hidden words, many events from the beginning of civilization until modern times—along with predictions of the future—can be and have been found, many times over. It's a vast code that predicted things from 9/11, to the Holocaust, to many current events.

"I've seen a conversation written out in the Torah relating to a man being held in a pit by terrorists,” he continued. “I later found myself in that exact situation once when I was in Israel. I heard the exact conversation I had seen earlier play out right before me. I haven't looked much into the codes since then, and I wonʼt. No man should see his fate in such detail."

He went on and on with mystery after mystery that rang true with me, providing archeological, historical, and scientiﬁc evidence for everything he talked about. What struck me the most about this man, however, was his deep passion for G-d; for the Jewish people; for the land of Israel; for mankind in general; and his staunch devotion to the Torah.

That evening I realized a couple of things: 1.) I had been a pretentious and presumptuous child who understood very little of what I had learned; and 2.) that I had been on a journey throughout my childhood. It was a journey of self-discovery, a process of spiritual growth and maturity—a path of enlightenment. Part of that enlightenment meant cutting away the sins of my past, and the ideas that kept me side- blinded by tunnel vision. I felt now that my eyes were slowly being opened to truths long forgotten by my family, by Christendom, and by the a great portion of the society of which I was a part. That very evening, after many hours of debate, study, meditation, and prayer, the scales fell off my eyes as a lens cover is pulled from a telescope. I felt resurrected from spiritual death, awakened from a lifetime of slumber.

I left that small wooden building, deep in the backwoods of Arkansas, forever changed. As the sun descended lazily behind the horizon, its last rays of light shining forth, piercing the darkness of the world, it pierced right through the last remnants of my spiritual and social heritage. As I drove away, that old gospel hymn played over and over in my head: I had begun the next phase of a life-long journey to ﬁnd “peace like a river in my soul.”