Despite religious beliefs, Myla Goldberg’s Bee Season demonstrates that faith has little to do with particular religions or organized religion. Instead faith is an inherent quality in individuals that can be developed over time through hope, education and perseverance. For such a development to occur, faith must not be sought because of religious prescripts, honor, or other rewards. Instead Bee Season demonstrates that a journey of faith must be pursued for its own sake to yield the greatest human triumphs of the expression of the soul. It must also be a journey dependent on the internal and not the external realm.
In Bee Season the author provides us with the tale of the Naumann family, Eliza and her brother Aaron and their parents Saul and Miriam. Saul Naumann is an Orthodox Jew who has been frustrated in his efforts to achieve transcendence through a variety of practices, from popping LSD to the mystical writings of the kabbalah, “Saul discovers LSD and Jewish mysticism at the same time, a chance concurrence that strengthens the validity of both” (Goldberg, 11). He works as a guitar playing cantor in the local synagogue. His wife Miriam is an intellectual who is so obsessed with cleanliness she is too clean for martial relations. Aaron is favored by his father who ignores Eliza. Aaron rejects his father’s Orthodox ways and tries to find himself through Hare Krishna. Meanwhile, Eliza is discovered by accident to have a “gift” for spelling. Up to this discovery she was virtually ignored by her father. He becomes fascinated by her gift where she seems to merely close her eyes to receive divination of the letters necessary to spell, “She is not frightened by Ms. Rai’s gavel hand. She knows when a word has reached its perfect form, SCALLION and BUTANE and ORANGUTAN blazing pure and incontrovertible in her mind” (Goldberg 40). It is a transcendence he, his wife and their son hav
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