Some years ago, when I was still working full time as a philosophy professor, I got a late-afternoon call from E.S. He was a senior colleague and good friend.

We’d exchanged just a few words when he remarked, with concern, “You sound like hell. What’s the matter?”

I told E.S. that I’d just hung up from talking with a woman friend whom I was soon to meet for dinner. “She said she’s going to kill herself and – from her tone – I believe her.”

As it happened, E.S. had lost a daughter to suicide. So he knew enough to take such a threat seriously. First, he advised, “don’t argue with her. Don’t try to talk her out of it.” Second, “buy her dinner.” Third, “buy her a present.” Fourth, “Whatever you might want to say later, first just listen.”

We met at a nice restaurant in the neighborhood. I told her that dinner would be my treat. From what I recall, my present was a teddy bear. In other words, nothing grim and grown up. And I settled back to listen.

She told me that she had submitted a book proposal to a publisher that had the potential dramatically to upgrade her status in her profession. She’d made her case thoroughly, covering every aspect of the venture, with great care and in detail. Nevertheless, after considering the proposal with much interest and at length, in the end it had been rejected.

Since I wasn’t in her line of work, I couldn’t feel the defeat as she felt it. But I understood that, for her, the setback was major. It came at a time when she was getting romantically involved with a man whom she wanted to impress with achievements and status of her own. Now she was back to being, in her own eyes, nobody special.

“So how do you plan to kill yourself?”

“I’ll rent a hotel room and take enough sleeping pills.”

“So they’ll find your body in the morning and that’ll restore your image? When he finds out, Jack will be devastated. Which do you think he’d rather have – a live fiancée who’s suffered a career setback, but can still be there to plan new initiatives and share the highs and the lows with him – or a dead body in a hotel room?”

I don’t know what I said that might have turned the tide. Or maybe it was nothing I said. Maybe it was the teddy bear.

But I think it was a friend’s seeing that her concern was with losing face – which is a concern with honor. What I did was take that concern as seriously as she did and try to address it on its own terms.

Another friend who contemplated suicide had a more classic motivation. She had joined a self-help group whose members included a guy who took it upon himself to be specially supportive to newcomers. In that capacity, he had managed to get her into his bed. It was unlikely that she was the first, or would be the last, to be taken advantage of in that manner.

Of course, in the aftermath she hated herself and wanted – with all her proud Iberian soul – to die. Nothing less would do justice to such a dishonor.

As a concept, nowadays honor is thought to belong to a pre-modern era. All I can say is, not in my experience.

I began what was understood to be our farewell dinner by accepting her view of honor as well as her view of its defeat. With me that acceptance didn’t have to field objections – whether philosophical, psychological or feminist. Like her, I too thought honor was real – though it played out differently for a woman than for a man – and you could lose it. If I had to defend that view on the terrain of philosophical argument, I might be in difficulties. But in real life, I knew what I knew.

So what did I say? I didn’t contest her loss. I fully granted the difficulties that encounter had put her in. I simply pointed out that this dog-of-a-man and his abuse of power wasn’t worth her life! Why honor him with her uncured defeat? Let him live to regret the loss of her charms and the ignominy of her contempt.

Did my interventions cost me anything? Yes. It cost me both friends. I assume that neither friend wanted an inconvenient witness to moments of defeat that otherwise would have been visible only to themselves. I respected their decisions.

On balance, I’m willing to accept the loss.

As long as they’re alive!

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The post-October 8th, 2023 outbreak of Jew-hatred in academe continues to open psychic wounds. As a battle-tested veteran of many combats (for example the one pictured above), this phenomenon of psychic wounds is itself startling to me. Let me give my readers a fly-over view of just a few of my earlier combats.

Years before the combat to save the core, before I had tenure in Brooklyn College, I voted for the loser in an election for chair of the philosophy department. I voted that way, in full knowledge that a different answer to a leading question asked me by a powerful man just before the election would have secured both my job and my promotion. For the following seven years, I was fired, reinstated thanks to a union-backed grievance procedure, and promptly fired again. And again. The interesting details are told in the final chapter of my book, A Good Look at Evil (under my name Abigail L. Rosenthal).

The point of bringing up that combat now is that – to the surprise of the union – it left me with no hard feelings. When it was over, I was just happy to be back in the department, among colleagues whose work I respected, and teaching students I loved. And that’s why I entered the fight to save Brooklyn College’s core curriculum.

Here’s another case: living with Jerry in Pennsylvania, I joined the local Reform Temple because holding on to Jewish identity here appeared to require more forethought than it had needed in New York City. As it turned out, all kinds of challenges came with that membership. Just to let your imagination get the picture, I’ll list the ones I recall: getting the heroic Phyllis Chesler invited to speak on the new anti-semitism (back when it was new); getting the anti-Israel weekly vigil-holders in the town square to fade away (their sublime devotion to peace believed consistent with frightening the nearby Jewish shopkeepers); persuading our then rabbi to stand face to face before the Presbyterian congregants who fired questions like arrows at him, by way of endorsing their denomination’s anti-Israel resolution; contacting the local museum about the anti-Israel (or anti-Jewish, I forget which) cartoon featured in a current exhibit and so on.

So here, in the peaceful hinterland, Jewish identity was turning out exhausting. The climactic case involved a guy whose charisma had captivated the Temple board’s president but meanwhile was behaving “inappropriately” with the women. He was not even a Temple member, so efforts to oust him would not have required any extraordinary measures, but nobody wanted to offend his high-level supporter. Except me, Abigail. Who was treated, in classic whistle-blower style – as herself the trouble-maker. And, although it took me some months (and giving a talk of my own to a Temple forum) to get my honor back – the predator was finally ousted and gone with him were the dangers he had brought to the Temple.

*. *. *

Given that combat record of psychic and emotional survival, I’m puzzled as to why I couldn’t just “roll with” one more trying phenomenon: here the positive glee with which the atrocities of October 7 had been celebrated in universities world-wide. Why did that affect memory and other psychic powers that had survived unimpaired in the wake of previous combats? Why now does my psyche seem to me like a fighter on the ropes?

Well, here’s what I seemed to hear when I put the same question in the form of a prayer:

*. *. *

You love and you believe in

the Jewish assignment in history:

real people in chronologically real

relations with God

as their Witness and companion-Traveler

on the timeline.

You also love and believe in

the House that Plato built –

where truth can be sought

without fear or favor.

*. *. *

Now to see them in seeming contradiction … is heartbreaking.

Related Content: A Good Look at Evil | The Campus Wars

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The title of this column tilts and teeters into a complaint so hackneyed – so yesterday – that even alluding to it might put one at social risk among the smart set.

This although just a few years back, mores had been different. Then, identity problems were very much in style and, if you didn’t have one, you were better off hiding a fact so socially inconvenient. If you were white, male and heterosexual, your cover story was that at least you knew how to joke about your multiply-compounded but unseemly privileges.

In the hierarchy of accusations, the worst thing you could be accused of was racism. As for Jews, in the circles of my youth, Jews wore their identity like a badge of honor. After all, Jews had been the people most consequentially targeted by a Nazi regime that depicted humanity in terms of races – superhuman versus subhuman.

So I grew up thinking of Jewish identity as talismanically protected – at least from the standpoint of any decent people with whom one would want to associate. Since I had a number of Israeli relatives then at the front in the fight for Jewish survival in the homeland – and was also said to be descended on the maternal line from 40 generations of rabbis – all that went to support my sense that I owned an identity that, for decent people, was unassailable.

When the victimes du jour became persons of color, I felt happy to welcome them to their newly-privileged condition and had friendships of greater intensity and candor with black philosophy students than my colleagues generally had. At the same time, because of my own personal experiences (retold in Confessions of a Young Philosopher), I didn’t hesitate to discourage student friends who were black from playing The Victim Card. I thought it was a species of con artistry and they could do better than that with their lives. So my advice to young people of color was to do what, in their place, I would have been well advised to do – and to avoid whatever I would have been, in their place, wise to avoid doing.

*. *. *

It was with such a background that I could fathom the high level of organization, money, propaganda and expertise that could have led students all over the world to rise as one person on October 8, 2023 to cheer the massively multiple rapes, beheadings, rippings of babies from wombs, roping together of whole families to set them afire, and other violations of humanity’s well-recognized norms. All that cheering from students and their equally ecstatic professors must have taken years of costly preparation. The whole phenomenon had caught me pretty much unawares.

I’ve been absorbing all this – the changed world – in successive waves, since it happened. I don’t have a thick layer of skin, much less thicker layers of denial, to serve as buffers between me and the changed reality that’s out there.

Being a philosopher by training, and perhaps by nature, I can’t deny the undeniable. Being a thin-skinned woman, the trouble is that I don’t find myself enfolded in the needed layers of group belonging with which I might naturally and seamlessly identify.

The liberals might possibly still cherish their Habits of Denial that I don’t share.

The conservatives might continue to enjoy their Habits of Belonging that I can’t claim.

As for identifying with a group whether or not such identification feels natural to me, pared down as I am, the only “group” with which right now I wholly identify –

has just one member.

Related Content: The Chosen People | Peterhouse Meets Abbie | The Color of the Sky

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There seems to be something at the heart of historical existence that’s probably incurable. It gets the name of envy or sibling rivalry. And it’s the insurmountable fear that God might love my brother or sister more than God loves me!

In the Bible, the Cain and Abel story lies at the inaugural moment of human sequential time: the precise it-starts-from-right-there moment. There is nothing deeper, more original or primordial that occurs to prepare the incident or explain it away.

Why are Jews hated – in every generation – on the basis of whatever rationalizations the culture of the moment can dig up at that moment?

I can answer that. Jews are hated because people secretly fear, and reflexively can’t stop themselves from believing, that God’s chosen people might be and remain the Jews.

God is far-seeing. He (please, fashionable-world, pardon the pronoun) didn’t change His mind: not in Hitler’s ovens, not in Auschwitz, nor Treblinka, nor Bergen Belsen.

Nor, in the present case, has God changed His mind.

Can God cure this sibling rivalry – the outsized unfairness, this hatred? (On the question of “outsized” or proportion – just how many Jewish nations are there, compared to the number of Muslim nations?) And who in human history has been so persecuted – on whatever pretexts are in the Zeitgeist, happening to enfashion among the beautiful people in this moment’s currents of belief and attitude – whatever the beliefs and attitudes might turn out to be right now?

To the great civilization of the West, there were – if we are to credit Matthew Arnold – over its long history, two foundations:

Athens and Jerusalem

The Academy, the House that Plato built in Athens – where truth can be, has been, is meant to be – sought without fear or favor, is the philosophical foundation.

And the other, which calls for telling the truth (without scanting the difficult parts or self-flattery) about what one has lived in linear time – the historical foundation – that is the contribution of Jerusalem, the Biblical foundation.

And I can tell you that my mind, as it contemplates the menacing of Jews in the Academy, and with that the present shredding, shattering and tearing asunder of this historically and culturally joined foundation, is having a helluva troubled time getting through it!

Speaking very personally, as a person who is both a philosophy professor and a Jew, I too am substantially a compound of Athens and Jerusalem. With the result that, when the civilization based on these companion-foundations splits asunder, I can sense myself as well, quite simply and obviously …

coming apart at the seams.

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A philosophical work — especially one drawn from a life — is never simply understood. It is received and interpreted through the concerns of the reader. And in a careful reading, one may come to see not only what was intended, but also something that had not been fully articulated at the time of writing.

What struck me most in Lee Trepanier’s review was the way he engaged the work as a life in motion; something shaped by relationships, embodiment, and historical experience. This is not always the case in philosophy, where the lived dimension of thought is often set aside in favor of argument alone. To have that dimension recognized is not only meaningful, but central to what the work itself is trying to do.

I am grateful for that kind of attention, and thought it worth sharing here with you.

Read the review (2–3 min): https://voegelinview.com/marked-by-love-and-life

Read more from Confessions of a Young Philosopher: https://a.co/d/05NUsyrO

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Published as part of the Theology Without Walls: Transreligious Explorations Series, the review by Lee Trepanier reflects on philosophy not as abstraction, but as something lived—through relationships, embodiment, and historical experience.

Read the full post on Theology Without Walls:

Theology's Substack

A New Review of Confessions of a Young Philosopher

A new review of Confessions of a Young Philosopher, part of the Theology Without Walls: Transreligious Explorations Series, is now available…

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a month ago · Theology Without Walls

Read the review:

Marked by Love and Life - VoegelinView

Explore the book:

Confessions of a Young Philosopher

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It happened one time that philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe said to her friend Ludwig Wittgenstein (the philosopher whose Philosophical Investigations she later translated), “What people have had such a history as the Jews!”

I think they were in Vienna at the time, where Wittgenstein had family roots. Since the Wittgensteins were (distantly) of Jewish origin, during World War II, the Austrian branch had paid a king’s ransom to the Nazi government, to avoid being counted as Jews.

At any rate, Wittgenstein replied to Anscombe’s remark – that the Jews had suffered a special history – “at once, with irritation, ‘What do you know of the histories of all the peoples there have been on earth?’” (Anscombe on Wittgenstein: Reminiscences of a Philosophical Friendship, eds. John Berkman and Roger Teichmann, Oxford, 2025.)

Wittgenstein is surely right, if we start from earliest evidences of homo sapiens sapiens. For all we know, there might well have been forerunner peoples targeted for the equivalent of two thousand years of spiteful hatred. Perhaps those prehistoric peoples were killed off – and consequently erased from human memory.

Nevertheless, finding myself presently inside Jewish history, I lack the luxury of detachment. Instead, my personal concern is how best to live the Jewish assignment – one I don’t recall choosing – at least not in its present form.

*. *. *

Within the past two days, two contrasting approaches presented themselves.

First, I received a Friday night dinner invitation from the Chabad rabbi whom I’ve mentioned before, in a recent column. Friday night, for observant Jews – and these must be about as observant as you get – is the time when the Sabbath descends and sanctifies time!

What I rather expected was that Jerry and I would, as two dinner guests, get better acquainted with the rabbinical couple in a small, face-to-face dinner setting.

That was not what happened. The orthodox have children. I believe there were seven of them, going from lap-size to young adult. Two were girls who looked to be in their teens. And there was one other woman guest to complete the gathering.

The boys, from littlest to biggest, were dressed like their father: in black pants, tallit (fringed shawl), and their head gear. They looked robust, did not seem crushed by all this, but did not talk audibly among themselves. As for the girls, to my eyes they looked to be as educated and emancipated as they’d so far aspired to be, though only their mother did much talking. I had no impression of hidden constraints or dampened spirits in the girls – and that’s something to which I’m fairly sensitive.

The home-made dishes were tasteful and plentiful. A lot of successful work had gone into each one of them. After the ritual handwashing and prayers in Hebrew, conversation began. Jerry seemed pretty much okay and at ease, though all this must have been even more foreign to him than to me.

Probably at my behest, the talk eventually turned to anti-semitism. To my astonishment, the rabbi did hilarious imitations of the way “nice people” nowadays voice their ill-concealed bigotry. His take-offs were sophisticated and multi-level.

I asked him what he thought the cause was. He didn’t cite psychology, biochemistry, politics or even theology! He thought the occurrence of anti-semitism took place at a level more foundational than those: perhaps ontological – coeval with being itself. Therefore, not something that can be extirpated from the fabric of existence.

What to do about it? He said you always have to fight back. He also thought the phenomenon offered a learning opportunity. The Jews can look within for the lessons that apply to themselves. The anti-semites who vaunt it (or worse) can of course learn not to do that.

*. *. *

The next morning was of course Saturday, and I had a Zoom hour of Torah Study scheduled at the Reform (up-to-date and liberal) Temple to which I belong. Here the differences – of dress, attitude and conviction – didn’t necessarily fit together like puzzle pieces . Participants did not feel protected by deep certainties.

Nevertheless, insights did emerge: a bit cacophonic and in a modern register – yet interesting and also authentic.

In one respect, the modern co-religionists are narrower. We don’t discuss current news within the class hour, but – even after hours – I doubt I could have raised the topic of anti-semitism – its deep causes – without hearing reflexive appeals for more understanding and unlimited good will. I take these to be the expressions of a certain narrow-mindedness that calls itself “liberal.” They simply need to broaden their horizons, taking in the fact that hey, evil is real and freely chosen. It doesn’t reduce to ignorance, limited opportunities, or emotional deprivation in childhood.

But not everybody can know everything. To some degree,

we are all specialists.

Related Content: A Good Look at Evil | The Chosen People | Bless Me Also Father

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Why Religion? A Personal Story

By Elaine Pagels

Why Religion? is partly a memoir, and partly the record of a personal struggle over the spiritual questions that trouble us all. I’ve not quite finished reading it, but the story it tells – along with the questions it raises – are of such obvious import that I see no need to wait before sharing it with readers.

Pagels is the Harrington Spear Paine Foundation Professor of Religion at Princeton University and the winner of practically every Fellowship I’ve ever heard of. In her field, I don’t imagine you can climb any higher. She’s widely known for breaking the news to educated readers that – although the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are the ones that came out ahead in the first-century CE competition over who got to tell the Jesus story – there are some interesting gospels that also ran.

The gospels that lost out in the competition – had nevertheless been copied by certain nonconformist monks in the 4^th-century CE. Those monks acted in secret to preserve the rejected gospels, hiding them inside a six-foot jar, that’s been unearthed at the Egyptian village of Nag Hammadi. The findings of Pagels‘ work – deciphering and translating the Nag Hammadi writings – are described in her book, The Gnostic Gospels. Its publication kicked up theological storms of condemnation and praise. Here are some of the storm samples:

“Raymond Brown, a renowned senior colleague and biblical scholar … attacked the secret gospels, declaring that since they were only rubbish in the first century, and were still rubbish, what I’d written could only deceive the public.”

Another prominent professor, Henry Chadwick, who’d been her “mentor at Oxford,” attacked Pagels in the London Review of Books, essentially agreeing with the early Church fathers that “Gnostics were essentially not Christian at all” not forgetting to add that “women, weaker than men and less rational, are easily seduced by heresy” (64).

There were enthusiastic reviews as well, but she seems to have taken both kinds – the favorable and the unfavorable – in admirably detached, scholarly stride.

That said, Pagels was clearly delighted that the gospels found in the six-foot jar gave a more prominent status to women than the subordinate status women had been assigned by male authorities like St. Paul, Bishop Irenaeus and Tertullian.

This book, however, is not primarily about her work, path-breaking though it’s been. Instead, it tells her life story. Perhaps because her student pathway partly overlapped my own, that story had me hooked from early on. I too took a course in Art History with Meyer Schapiro (he’d been a classmate of my father and his wife Lillian had been my pediatrician) and also audited a course in New Testament with her great mentor, Krister Stendahl.

Up to a point, however, her youthful studies seemed much more trouble-free than my own. While still a graduate student, she married Heinz Pagels. He was the love of her life, as their wedding photo transparently shows. Pagels was a gifted physicist, working at the frontier of current knowledge of the physical universe and its constituent components. Their first child, Mark, was a beautiful little boy, as we can also see from another photo in her book.

What could be more desirable – more fulfilling – than all this?

What happened next seems to me captured most precisely in this verse by the American poet Edgar Allan Poe:

The angels not half so happy in heaven

Went envying her and me …

Mark, their radiant little boy, was discovered to have “a hole in the walls of his heart.” Though he survived the initial surgery, which was deemed successful, there was still one chance in ten thousand that he would develop pulmonary hypertension, which was “invariably fatal” (p. 100). Yet, that’s precisely what happened!

When he died, Heinz said to a friend, “I would’ve given my life for him, but no one would take it” (p. 119).

The loss seemed to lance the whole world on the point of a fatal spear.

Recovery from their shared sorrow seemed almost unimaginable. Since her pregnancy had itself been an event that beat the odds – they had meanwhile gone ahead to adopt two siblings, Sarah and then David, so as to provide Mark with a more generous-sized family. Now, if only for their new children’s sakes, the heartbroken parents needed to pull themselves together and go on with life as soon, and as normally, as they could manage.

Till the truly unthinkable happened. They’d been on vacation. Heinz had been out climbing the Colorado Rockies, as he had safely done many times before. Except that this time his path underfoot gave way unexpectedly, and suddenly he plunged more than a thousand feet to his death.

Despair might have looked the most truthful way for her to take this ultimate catastrophe – except that she now had these two small adopted children, who depended entirely on her.

Her memoir chronicles the trajectory of her near-despair, lightened by occasional dream-visions, helps from friends who include meditating monks, till she is able to weave some of the questions raised by her sorrow into further textual explorations.

At the point I’ve got to, she’s pondering the significance of the Jesus in the gnostic Gospel of Thomas. That Jesus seems to her more accessible than the more abstract savior of Paul’s epistles. We know that Paul had never met Jesus in the flesh. The Book of Acts records that Paul quarreled with the disciples who had known Jesus. Nevertheless, Paul’s view of the mission of Jesus became the one adopted by Christian doctrine. Does she have any distinct, nonPauline yearnings to make contact with God? I’m not sure. In any case, she seems to me a sincere truth-seeker.

*. *. *

What do I think of this long and troubling story that is Pagels’ memoir?

I really don’t know. If God exists (and I believe God does exist), the question must take in God’s part in the story.

Did the Creator allow this catastrophe to visit the author’s young life because … giving her powerful and honest mind a question so oversized to grapple with would also give her readers a prompt to reflect more deeply on the fragility of all our human lives? Well, maybe, but maybe not.

At any rate,

such wisdom as I have

doesn’t rise to the level

of this tragedy.

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A spooky title for this column, I know. But first, let’s pause over the question: do the dead live on – in some form appropriate to their condition – but still recognizably themselves?

My mother was quite close to Louise Green, the woman who came once a week to clean, and later helped me very much in the work of closing the apartment on 96th Street after both my parents were gone.

One day Louise told me that my mother had visited her from the afterlife. “She’s with Henry [my father],” Louise went on, “and they’re very happy to be together again.”

Only one feature of that afterlife visit struck Louise as remarkable. “I never thought she’d come to Brooklyn!’ she said.

I have other such stories and I’ll bet you do too. However, the story on my mind today is one I saw recently on a video, reported by a man who gave only minimal information about himself:

His name was Jonathan and he was 75 years old.

Since the story was so unusual that one would be inclined to doubt it, I looked for any kind of corroboration. The sole supportive evidences were his face and his voice as he told his story. Neither showed any of the marks of doubleness that undercut made-up stories. Jonathan spoke with a slight foreign accent, but it was an accent recognizable to me. In childhood, in my parents’ home, I’d met people who had accents like his.

This is what Jonathan said. He’d been sitting at home in his familiar armchair, feeling at ease and in apparent good health. But suddenly he felt himself losing balance and consciousness. Everything went dark. He no longer had a pulse (as later he was told). His heart had stopped.

There was little time for dread or panic before he found himself in quite a wonderful ambiance. Presently he was face to face with a figure he had no trouble recognizing as Jesus. (I’ve read of Jews returning from the afterlife who reported seeing Jesus, as well as Christians who didn’t, so this by itself doesn’t identify Jonathan as a Christian. Especially since his accent put me in mind of the refugees of my childhood.)

“Jonathan,” said the Jesus figure to him, “I am showing you something. You will return and you will speak!” (This message was conveyed rather than uttered in words.)

What Jesus showed him was a place that was quite unmistakable.

Hell.

The fire burning there was unlike any fire we know – in that it burned with intention! In the midst of that very fire was the late Ayatollah Khamenei.

“I recognized him immediately,” said Jonathan. “He was there and he saw me.”

Here Jonathan emphasized that he himself was “not a political man.” Also that he “took no satisfaction in it. What I saw,” he went on, “filled me with a grief so heavy” … that he feels it still!

From hell, Khomeini had a message for him. “Tell the world that no man who uses God’s name like a sword for his own power is serving God. … The fire knows the difference even when the world does not.”

“It was,” Jonathan added, “a soul stripped of every title, rank, earthly armor – just a man, terrified, burning, undone.”

* * *

That was about the substance of Jonathan’s message. Was he telling the truth? Even if he meant to be honest, could any of this be thought credible?

All I could judge by was his face, his expression, the timber of the voice and the look in his eyes. There was nothing double in what I could see – nothing covert or complicated or self-important. To me, by whatever marks one uses to distinguish the fraudulent from the genuine, he appeared credible.

The Comments posted below the video seemed to come overwhelmingly from evangelical Christians and they were as jubilant as if they’d won a race in the intergalactic Olympics. Hey, hurray! – we win! We get the gold! The champs are us!

However, I noticed that Jonathan himself had refrained from identifying himself with any denomination or faith community. He’d laid stress on inner genuineness in contrast to outward show. He’d not appeared to endorse any of the known brands of religion.

So what do I personally make of it? Obviously it made an impression or I wouldn’t be devoting a whole column to it!

Do I think – along with Jonathan and possibly Plato – that every soul stands before the same bar of judgment after death? Not if I credit the wide array of afterlife reports. (For a somewhat different report, see my article, “What Ayer Saw When He Was Dead.” A. J. Ayer was a highly-regarded twentieth-century philosopher who “died” in the clinical sense for about fifteen minutes during which he saw what it would be like to live inside the world that his theories had postulated. He discovered that it wouldn’t be livable! It’s a nice test for any philosophic theory.)

I do take seriously the implication that when we depart this life, we deposit on this side all the honors – all the ribbons – that we’ve won here. Also, as Jonathan said, that “any wall between ourselves and accountability will come down.”

By the same token, I honor a life unmarked by pretense – though humility too can be an affectation.

To be a straight shooter is

not as simple as it sounds.

Related Content: Thought Faces the Future | Death Be Not Proud | What Ayer Saw When He Was Dead

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Our return from California last Saturday February 28th roughly overlapped my birthday on the Monday directly following. However, we didn’t set aside time to celebrate on that Monday, being preoccupied with all that had needed attention while we’d been away.

Nevertheless, birthday wishes were cascading onto my online sites, from people I’d never met – except in the semi-science-fictional world of cyberspace. Science fictional or not – I took care to thank each and every one of these virtual friends. To all the people – who knew (God knows how) that March 2nd was my birthday and whom I don’t know – heartfelt thanks and may the force be with you!

The force seems to have been with me since, during that birthday week, several meaningful events – of unequal and unequivalent scope and type – converged.

First, on Sunday morning, Jerry told me of the joint US/Israeli actions in Iraq, such that Ayatollah Khomeini had been killed along with 40 of his top leaders. Since, directly and via proxies, Iran had kept the Jewish state in its genocidal crosshairs, and incidentally killed hundreds of Americans while stating its intention to kill more – this news was a bolt of lightning in my skies. Hard – near-impossible – to absorb. (Commentators differ on how imminent was the global threat posed by the rulers of Iran. But nobody thought that their publicly-proclaimed, long-term purposes had changed.)

Monday the 2nd, my actual birthday, was mostly spent catching up with bills, mail and honing last week’s column.

But on Tuesday March 3rd, the day after my birthday, there was the beautiful, never-before-seen hawk! All during our breakfast, he sat still, immobile, perched on a branch directly outside our window. When, after breakfast, I at last got up and left, so did the hawk.

You want to say that’s a coincidence? Well it could be. But I take it as a celebratory visit from Mother Nature’s wide and wonderful world. Mind, I’m no Henry David Thoreau. Snakes don’t curl appreciatively around my ankles when I walk in the woods, as Louisa May Alcott, who knew Thoreau as a child, reported wildlife doing with the real Thoreau. I’m a city kid. So I’ve not earned any such tributes from Nature as he did. However, I take the hawk’s breathtaking visit to be a sort of award for not pretending to be anyone or anything but myself. The way the hawk is merely himself!

Then later that Tuesday someone rang our doorbell. Unless it’s a delivery, that doesn’t happen very often. I was upstairs working on “The Unexpected,” last week’s column, so Jerry went down to see who it was. The visitor said he’d come to see me. As I stepped downstairs, into the foyer came a tall, bearded man, garbed in somewhat antique black, carrying a bag containing sweets for the holiday of Purim. That holiday celebrates an occasion described in the Biblical Book of Esther, when Jews who’d been slated for slaughter by the wicked courtier Haman had managed to turn the tables thanks to the creative stratagems of Esther, the Persian King’s Jewish queen. Persia is of course the ancient name for Iran!

Though I didn’t belong to the rabbi’s Chabad congregation, he’d brought me these presents for the Purim holiday because – after the narrowly-thwarted, murderous attack on the Chabad headquarters in Brooklyn – I’d sent the local Chabad a check in sympathetic support. In my covering letter, I mentioned two separate occasions when I’d met his wife, and then him, and found both spiritually quick and thoughtful.

Thanking this rabbi for the gift, I mentioned that I’d just had a birthday, on Monday the 2nd, the day before. To my surprise, he took birthdays quite seriously. They commemorate, as he told me, the day the soul enters the body for the spiritual purposes belonging uniquely to that person.

“How interesting,” I said sincerely as I thanked him for the Purim sweets.

The following day, Wednesday the 4th, a letter arrived that the Chabad Rabbi had written previously. It explained his visit of the 3rd. I’d written a letter, enclosed with my check, that expressed my appreciation for two previous interactions with him and his wife. The Chabad rabbi’s letter expressed gratitude for my earlier letter. What particularly struck me was the power of remembering that his letter showed. In my own more modern temple, I’d fought many battles to protect and further the temple’s interests. But at present, so far as I know, there is no one who remembers any of it.

Remembering is a power of the spirit.

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We returned yesterday evening from our week-long stay in California where I resumed treatments for neuropathy. The treatments that in earlier visits I’d received at the Intraneural Facilitation Treatment clinic affiliated with Loma Linda Hospital differed from the predictions of doom previously pronounced by a top-dollar New York neurologist. In refreshing contrast, the innovative yet finely calibrated methods of Mark Bussell at INF hadn’t included dire predictions and, in the past, actually had helped.

That said, I was not expecting a hopeful outcome from this trip. Why not? Well, both the fine surgeon who’d fixed my hip fracture of last May and the fine physical therapists – who’d checked my exercises for months afterward – had deemed me fully repaired by their lights. And I knew that what they called a successful outcome had left me nowhere near as walkable as I’d been prior to the accident. I didn’t brood about it, but I was not optimistic about our California trip.

Nonetheless, from the first day of our week there, when Mark Bussell characterized my current condition with precision – as well as describing what the previous interventions had left undone – and explained what could now be done to put me back where I’d been before the accident – my expectations underwent steep upgrading. It was his view that, once the injury was fully repaired, I could go back to where I’d been before: healing the neuropathy itself.

What the heck. I’m for fixing whatever can be fixed. I don’t get off on other people’s pity! So we returned to our Pennsylvania home with me in a notably better mood than I’d been in when we’d left it.

“Any good news this morning?” I said jokingly to Jerry as he joined for brunch. Normally, Jerry catches up on the day’s news first thing in the morning, and then briefs me, since I don’t have the heart to look.

“Yes,” Jerry said, in reply to my atypically hopeful question. “Khamenei is dead.”

The mass murderer of his own people had been killed! It seems there had been an Israeli attack (coordinated with US actions on other fronts) on the entire first-tier Iranian leadership. They had collected in one place, together with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, for a top-secret meeting. Evidently, somebody who was in a position to know didn’t keep the secret, since they were all dead from a single strike.

I thought Jerry must be joking. The analogous moment that came to mind occurred years back, in June of 1976. My philosopher father had telephoned from Maine to say –

“The Israelis have rescued the hostages!”

He was referring to the Israeli and other Jewish passengers who’d been on an Air France flight when it had been taken over by highjackers. Chillingly, they’d been separated from nonJewish passengers – the latter eventually released to resume their journeys – while the Jewish hostages were being held in Uganda’s Entebbe International Airport. At that time, Uganda was under the dictatorial rule of Idi Amin. The demands of the highjackers had been relayed to the Israeli government with, of course, no assurance that meeting those terms would save the lives of the hostages.

So back then, I had not understood what my father was calling to tell me. Painstakingly, I explained that his so-called news could not possibly be believed since the Jewish captives were at the mercy of forces under the command of a dictator with a reputation for cruelty.

My father simply repeated the “impossible” news till at last I stopped lecturing and started listening.

This time was a lot like that earlier time. I simply could not take in what Jerry was telling me. It was all, as I well knew, impossible.

Okay. It was possible. A lot of highly unlikely occurrences were possible. But it couldn’t be actual. Khamenei was not the kind of mass murderer who could be killed at one of his own top-secret meetings.

*. *. *

As of this writing, we don’t know how it will play out. Perhaps, by the time this column is posted, the situation will have darkened, especially considering its ever-ramifying complexity and the tipping forces of the past.

But still: a flawless operation, the two nations having kept their simultaneous actions a secret even from those who get paid to unearth secrets … .

All of which goes to show that – as my mother used to say –

the unexpected always happens.

Today I’ve read to the end of two books, both about lives honed on the cutting edge of history.

So what is “history” and what does it mean to live on its edge? Let’s stipulate that history is the tale told by the transition from one view of the meaning of life to another view of life’s meaning. So it’s not just the chronicle of what happened but the story of why the participant/actors thought it happened and what they believed was at stake.

Though a realistic account must include chance events – unforeseen accidents – the whole medley becomes a scene of action when the agents line up events so that they will take their places within the story-line of human purposes.

In sum: macro-history, the big story, lines up more or less the way our personal lives do: with a story to honor, or betray, or forget, or resolutely continue to carry forward.

The book about Churchill, the British Prime Minister who rallied his country, including the US and the Allies-in-exile, to resist the Nazi project, bears the title, Churchill and the Jews: A Lifelong Friendship (2007) by historian Martin Gilbert. I have it as a house present given me by Australian philosopher David M Armstrong, when he and his wife Jenny visited us here in Bucks County. It’s been years since I looked at it, but somehow got curious to reread it now, at the same time that I’ve been reading Crash of the Heavens, a book about World War II heroine Hannah Senesh, written in 2025 by investigative journalist Douglas Century.

I never knew that Churchill, whose eloquence and unusual practical intelligence made a substantial difference to the Allied victory in World War II, had also been a consequential figure in modern Jewish history. He happened to like Jews, even as a child – not a common preference among our British friends. “Some people like Jews,” Churchill wrote in 1920, “and some do not, but no thoughtful man can doubt the fact that they are beyond all question the most formidable and the most remarkable race [sic] which has ever appeared in the world [p. 38].”

However, what cemented Britain’s commitment to an eventual “National Home” for Jews in Palestine was not their “formidable and remarkable” talent. It was acetone. Thirty thousand tons of it were needed as a key component in the production of explosives that would facilitate Britain’s supremacy on the High Seas and eventual victory in World War I. Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty when he approached an obscure Jewish immigrant chemist named Chaim Weizmann with a request that he produce acetone in that quantity. Weizmann said he could do it, given certain assistants and equipment. Then Churchill was succeeded in the Admiralty by Arthur J. Balfour, “whom Weizmann won over to the prospect of British support for a Jewish National Home in Palestine once Turkey were defeated (p. 25).”

The end results of these unplanned coincidences would be the letter sent by Balfour in November of 1917 that “His Majesty’s Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people… .”

The backtrackings and reconfigurings and post-War turning of the whole project over to the United Nations in 1948 – eventuated in a UN vote for partition – accepted by the Jewish representatives but answered with war by the five nearest Arab nations. All that occurs farther along, though detailed with clarity in Gilbert’s valuable account. I found much that I never knew in this exhaustively researched history.

Where does Hannah Senesh figure in the larger story? She was a young Hungarian woman, very pretty and smart, who became a Zionist when her native Hungary became unrecognizably dangerous under a floodtide of anti-semitism. She then made her way to Palestine. She joined a Kibbutz in Palestine, learned Hebrew and, with her obvious talents and strength of purpose, was recruited to join a contingent of Jewish volunteers under the command of the British authorities, to be parachuted behind Nazi lines in Eastern Europe. Their mission was to aid downed Allied pilots and rescue any Jews who’d somehow managed to escape the Nazi mass murder regime.

In carrying out her task, Hannah fell into enemy hands, was tortured, became a fellow-prisoner inspiring to other captives and finally, in the last year of the War, was shot dead by her captors. She’d been a gifted poet and writer, a young woman of singular dedication and focus, and she is now a national heroine in Israel.

As the two histories unfolded for me, I began to locate members of my own family in some of the incidents recounted. My first cousin served in one of the units that made up the British component of the Italian campaign. Another cousin, his sister, was smuggling arms from the British headquarters in Cairo where she worked as a young secretary. My mother’s cousin was manufacturing bullets in a factory that was literally underground – the noise of production masked by the old-fashioned washing machine placed above its entrance. The British army unit that was stationed nearby took its weekly laundry to that noisy machine.

Here’s what Hannah Senesh wrote to her brother, who’d arrived in Palestine knowing nothing of her assignment. Her note was written before what would be her final mission.

Will you understand? … Will you sense that I had no choice, that I had to do this? There are events that render one’s life meaningless, a worthless plaything, or else compel one to action, even if it means sacrificing one’s life . …

What moral can one draw from these interwoven evidences of world-historical lives? Did lives like these unfold with a Divine Scriptwriter writing them out? Or does Chance roll the dice?

Even to have an opinion, one would need to stand above these events, which I am quite unable to do.

I suspect that God is involved, but with a component of freedom in the mix as well. Once freedom is included, no one – perhaps not even God – can predict

how the story will come out.

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What is desire? It’s what gives direction to our lives – on the organic and also conscious levels. If we lack purpose, our animate existence loses the sense that it is going somewhere. The consequences can be life-threatening. In personal cases I’ve met, directionlessness shows up as a crisis.

Some years back, I wrote a philosophical article bearing the title, “The Intelligibility of History,” which widens the same point so that it can be tracked in the cultures in which human beings live and in human history more generally. Here’s an excerpt from that article.

“What finally is culture? Culture can be deemed a collective passion. If a nexus of desired relations (biological, practical, creedal, poetic, legal, institutional, military) is held together … at a certain limit by a certain “range of knowable options,” those who think this limit to be unsurpassable have it in common as their collective passion.” …Cultures set boundaries for individuals and the boundaries are not so ineffable that the individual who transgresses them will not be promptly so informed.”

“History is an inquiry. If the inquiry is successful, the historian will have a tale to tell, the tale told by the transition from one collective passion to another, or from one phase to another of the same collective passion.”

Although these pronouncements are excerpts from a philosophical article, I cite them here shorn of their justifying arguments. That said, I believe it will be handy to bear these concepts in mind – culture as the shared or collective passion that draws boundaries around what its individual members feel entitled to desire – before I proceed to lay out my present concern.

In 1999, Wendy Shalit, then a young college graduate, wrote a book, A Return to Modesty, whose very title prompted an outpouring of ridicule and condemnation that was instant and widespread. She was caricatured in respected venues like the NY Times Book Review, The Nation, the NY Observer and so on as a pitiable poster child for the very repression and sexual hangups that liberated women were way above and beyond.

At the same time, as Shalit reports in the Preface to her present edition, messages of another kind – hundreds of appreciative letters from women and men of college age – were also arriving in her mailbox. She has kept those letters. And meanwhile, despite all the condemnations from voices on the cutting edge, Modesty began to have cultural impact. It was reflected in new types of clothing which trend-conscious manufacturers began making available – more modest swim suits and everyday wear that looked more subdued and lady-like.

Meanwhile, time passed, experiences piled up, the culture underwent some changes in its shared sensibility – fashions in feeling were changing – till finally saying “no” started to get a more sympathetic press.

So, do we have a happy ending for Shalit’s innovation in sensibility? Not quite. In her school days, her parents had stepped in to get her excused from the new sex education. However, the girls whose parents had not been alert enough to rescue them from the coed sex education class hours, were finding themselves jeered at by the boys, groped and even targeted for group assaults! Interestingly, Shalit, who’d spent the sex ed hours in the library, continued to be treated by the boys as she had been before.

Her female classmates who went on to college would find themselves expected to take male roommates and to say “yes” to sex without commitment. With such experiences and expectations, they would prove far less self-protective than Shalit. Her new Preface reports that “sex education” – in the same factual, counter-erotic, auto-mechanic style – has now widened in its scope, going as far down as kindergarten and first grade. At certain points in her account, I had to stop reading. It was too horrifying.

So what’s it all about, really? What’s driving this (actually desire-killing) education? Young men are backing into porn-addiction. Young women are suppressing their need for ideality, as they ricochet between mortification and the blunting of their feminine sensibility. Among shamed girls, suicides are increasing.

Is there a hidden agenda driving all this? If there is, I’m not privy to the backrooms where it’s being devised. But I can look at the results and read those back into the agenda. What are the results?

1. Desire loses its vector – its directional character.

2. One has trouble remembering what it was that one personally wanted.

3. Directionless, one can more readily be had for the taking.

If you no longer know what you want, you’ll be more easily subject to what others want of you. That’s not how a free human being operates. It’s not how a free society survives.

If, as I’ve argued in The Intelligibility of History, culture is a way of organizing desire, and history may be understood as a movement from one form of desire-thus-organized to the next, then what the so-called “sex education” of the young amount to is this:

the inversion of culture –

and the emptying out

of meaningful human history.

Related Content: Confessions of a Young Philosopher | The Intelligibility of History

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In recent years, Jerry has been urging me to write something about women. This because, in his observation, I genuinely like – even love – women! He thinks this a credential for writing on the topic, since a lot of women might not feel that way about other women. Also (and this might be an additional qualification) I see real women in terms of their actual lives, in contrast to those putative feminists who force them into the Procrustean beds of their theories.

In contrast to Sigmund Freud’s famous question, What do women want? – which leaves real women silent as the Sphinx in the desert – if I have some occasion to ask that question of some particular woman, I’ll wait for her unique answer. Why drum up a mystery where there might not be one?

These considerations seemed to me to warrant giving it a go. So I set myself the project of reading through a list of women writers who might furnish real-life perspectives on Freud’s questionable question.

So, having earlier read whatever I could when Second Wave Feminism was at high-tide, I’ve now read for the first time titles that include Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, also Joan Didion’s The White Album, several short story collections by Simone de Beauvoir (having of course earlier read much of de Beauvoir), plus Marriage: A History by Stephanie Coontz, and a reminder collection assembled by Miriam Schneir, Feminism in Our Time: The Essential Writings, World War II to the Present. Also, The End of Gender by sex neurologist Debra Soh, plus several titles by Judith Butler for whom the biological side seems pretty much irrelevant.

Right now, I’m more than halfway through The Book of Lives, subtitled A Memoir of Sorts by Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood whose jesting photo adorns the cover.

Of course, if I decide to continue along these lines, the list still to be covered will be much longer, but what’s my impression so far?

There is no woman question.

At least not in the singular. That is, there are as many women-originated questions in the plural as there are women. Also, there are certain biologically-based (and correlative history-based) vulnerabilities that are shared by all women.

Is there still any overarching danger that all women face? Yes, and it has to do with self-defense. From feminism’s First Stage in the nineteenth century, women voiced the need for independent access to the money they’d earned or inherited. Before that time, on the whole (except for widows in certain countries and circumstances) they’d not had such access. Of course, many men are very fine people, but you don’t want to give anybody that much legal power over other adults. So women needed the right to vote and thereby to alter their legal standing, with regard to inheritance and other self-protective concerns.

One of the crucial new factors within Second Stage Feminism was independent access to contraception. With this unprecedented freedom from continuous pregnancies, even married mothers could seek long-term employment. Broad changes, both legal and social, were required to protect the newly-expanded options. And of course there were abuses, residual or newly-afforded, that individuals who love and care about women – also about justice – still combat at the present hour. I’ve had the honor of counting some of these warriors, living and dead, among my friends.

But is there anything meaningful within Freud’s larger question? What about Woman in the singular? Is there anything special that she – Woman – wants?

Well yes. So far as I can tell, there is. She wants to succeed as a woman. There’s an art to being a woman. It’s highly skilled. It can be practiced in quite individual ways. Like any art, it’s hard to teach. Analogously, though you can teach drawing from live models, you can’t teach a student how to be another Degas.

Women either learn the womanly art intuitively, or under the influence of a model, or both. How do I know this? I’ve seen and loved some women who were such models.

If there have been models who were actual people – not fictions – then we may need to look for recent exemplars so as to learn what we can from them.

Or, if we don’t find such models, it might be instructive to revisit the non-models or anti-models whom we have met and think what they might have done differently. (Cynicism and bitterness are tempting but not useful here.)

Also, if we happen to be on the lookout for models, it might be helpful to realize that.

The womanly art has been a neglected cultural power. At present, we may need to study it and –

relearn it

from the ground up.

Related Content: Feminism with Something to Hide | A Misremembered Woman

The adults among whom I grew up were somewhat mysterious to me. They weren’t like other kids’ parents. But they were hyper-intelligent, at home in a world of emigrés – including the women who served as my European role models – as well as people you might call “Americans in high degree.” (Not necessarily a matter of social class.)

That said, I early formed an intuitive resolve not to live on my inheritance. Not to be what the French call a rentier – who lives off the rents paid by inherited tenants. Though I loved my parents and adored – thrived in – their world, I needed to find something like bedrock to stand on independently.

I found at least two ideal exemplars of what I had in mind: the Thoreau of Walden Pond and M. K. Gandhi with his satyagraha (truth-force). Okay okay, I know. The apostle of self-sufficiency depended on Mrs. (Ralph Waldo) Emerson to pick up and take care of his laundry. And, of the great Indian leader, it was said that, “It takes an awful lot of money to keep Gandhi living in poverty.”

So I was aware, even then, that the role models of my first youth bore traces of ordinary humanity. They were not cartoon cutouts but mixed characters like ourselves.

What was ideal about them, to my mind, was that they tried actually to be what they said they were. Their relative simplicity was fascinating to me. I didn’t want to be deeply shadowed by torment and “interesting” – like, for example, the protagonists in Dostoevsky’s novels.

Like Gandhi and Thoreau, I too wanted to be … just who I said I was! Or, where there was a discrepancy – a gap between word and deed – to know the reasons why. Or like the characters implicitly aimed at in Socratic dialogues, where again the point is to be who you say you are! If that were easy, there would’ve been no need for a Socrates.

Question: Is there anything off kilter in my illustrative cases?

Anything that rings wrong?

Well yes, three things:

1. Mrs. Ralph Waldo Emerson did Henry David Thoreau’s personal laundry once a week, although we never see her tiptoe discretely across the ground that lies back of Walden Pond.

2. Pre-adolescent girls, children of the grownups in the ashram, were placed naked alongside Gandhi in the bed where he slept each night. The Mahatma claimed that this was a fail-safe way for him to test his commitment to celibacy. So far as I know, the mature women, who in childhood had furnished this test, continued to maintain a loyal (though possibly embarrassed) silence.

3. Socrates sent away the mourning women (including his soon-to-be widowed wife Xantippe) before conducting the final dialogue with his disciples that’s recorded in The Phaedo. At the conclusion of that conversation, he drank the lethal hemlock to which the Athenian jury had condemned him.

In the first case, the erasure simplifies the real story somewhat. In the second case, one wonders if the erasure conceals personal ambivalence or at least psychological unfairness. In the third case, the erasure of the women (though culturally-sanctioned in that place and time), deletes one human facet of the suffering brought about by the court-ordered execution of Socrates.

These three men – Thoreau, Gandhi and Socrates – were players in some of the best-known Adventures of Humanity with Highest Things. It takes nothing from their contributions to remark that the record has yet to show

how in future

women could appear

in all their own imperfect reality

inside equivalent adventures.

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During the week just passed, I’ve gotten three invitations to enter into consequential interactions with correspondents who represented themselves as persons but in fact were not persons. What precedents are there for such an experience, in life or literature?

Jewish mystical literature includes an entity called a “Golem” who is, I take it, man-made but, once created, takes on a life of its own.

I’m mostly familiar with the term when it picks out someone who’s acting in a subpar way – possibly because the individual is under a misleading influence. In my experience, it’s not a frequently-heard insult.

Then there is Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein, where a scientist by that name creates a man-like entity who is unfairly feared, shunned and proves sensitive enough to suffer a tragic end.

I mention these precedents just to situate my own recent experience in the wider context of literature and legend. Despite their occult or futuristic context, the categories of good and evil would not have been out of place in those earlier stories.

What’s recently happened to me was neither literature nor legend.

One apparent lady who contacted me online, represented herself as a literary agent, and offered to promote my books to “thousands” of new readers. She had a fee scale, varying with the scope and duration of her promotion efforts.

One apparent gentleman presented himself as the impresario of a reading group, and wanted my permission to discuss A Good Look at Evil in his group. He had not yet come to the point of naming his terms.

Since both of these applicants cited only the final chapter of that book – treating it as a stand-alone piece of writing – it was clear to me that their enthusiasm had not come from actually reading A Good Look at Evil.

It was the third applicant who came closest to captivating me. She purported to have lived with her family in or near the same town in Downeast Maine where my parents had a home. I continued to spend summers there for some time after my parents were gone. Many of the friends carried over from my parents’ time; others were mine independently. All were people I valued very much: clear-sighted, extremely decent, straightforward and not easily deceived.

There was a nice view of the Bay of which, from the upper story of our barn, I did several paintings. One hangs over the desk where I’m typing tonight.

So eager was I to find a new friend from a place I loved that, only on reflection did I realize that this supposed fellow-writer and lover of the Maine coast had not said anything in her emails to me that I hadn’t emailed to her first! Oh, and incidentally she had an agent to recommend … .

What’s the lesson here? Is it just that there’s “a sucker born every day”?

What I find so disconcerting is the way styles of con-artistry have changed!

It’s quite possible that none of these deceivers-by-email is a single, actual human being! Each one might be AI generated … .

So the wickedness that allows a bad actor to imitate sincerity for the purpose of exploiting a victim is, in all three cases, impersonal, distant from its target and deniable – by its perpetrators.

That said, a word of warning from me is due to all these new-style perps: Your deceptions may be more deniable these days, but –

they continue to go on your spiritual report card.

By contrast, here are some real people:

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I am trying to cope with a feeling of personal fragility that has not been a concern in my life – up till now!

Fragility can of course be culture-wide as well as person-sized. G. W. F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind can actually be read as a handbook of such double-level cases. Human beings are not just creatures that crawl around, growl and grunt. We are creatures that speak and think. And the thinking that we do takes place against a background of inherited opinion, perspectival points of view, and recollected bodies of experience. It follows that the personal and the cultural do affect each other mutually.

Ergo, the most fire-eating rebel ordinarily shares much of the cultural backdrop of the conformist that he or she opposes. They speak the same language, though the one may want to tear down what the other defends.

The deeds I’ve done, and assumptions that underlay them, must have had a pretty deep and solid basis, when I consider that they took me through a succession of combats that warriors tougher and braver than I might not have survived. I didn’t win them all, but I survived them all – as did my ability to work, to enjoy life and to love. Here’s a partial list of such life-testing combats:

1. Voting with the minority in an election for chair of my philosophy department, getting fired – along with every other assistant professor who voted “wrong” – and becoming the only winner of a seven-year fight for reinstatement with tenure. I remained friends with the deserving colleagues who didn’t win, and I didn’t hold a grudge against the senior colleagues who’d put me through all that.

2. Seeing a circle of inherited family friends believe false but damaging allegations purveyed by a person taking revenge for my resistance to that person’s control. The false accuser won that round and I lost the friends. I’m still saddened when I think about it, but I didn’t despair or hate my false accuser. I just went on with my life.

3. Seeing a cherished collegial friend fall prey to the same calumny. That’s sad indeed, but one goes on.

4. Weathering cancer, possibly brought on by items #2 and #3. Symptoms presented on two successive occasions. During the first round, I went through the approved treatment protocols (lumpectomy and radiation) at three well-respected New York hospitals. When the problem seemed to recur, and more of the same was advised, I turned to holistic methods instead. What’s the moral? Either the symptoms weren’t evidence of cancer or, alternatively, they were and the holistic methods worked. Since I’m not in the medical field, I really don’t care which it was.

5. Fighting to oust from my temple a predator who was behaving inappropriately with the women, and suffering in consequence a classic reprisal against the whistleblower. Eventually the predator was ousted, before he could do irreversible damage, and I resumed normal relations with my reconfigured house of worship.

Well, I left out a few but you get the idea. I love peace and I hate trouble. Nevertheless – without at all wanting to be – it seems that I am something like a combat veteran. I always hope it will turn out to be someone else’s fight. I look to the left and the right – in front and in back – but if there’s no one else to take it on, and there’s something that needs to be fought, I will step up.

That’s the background. But what happened on October 7 and 8, 2023, was one too many for me. The sadistic joy, seemingly worldwide – how about the Harvard Divinity School! and btw what god are they worshipping? — was actually more than I could sustain without suffering symptoms affecting mind and body.

Sometimes one finds out what founding beliefs one has been standing on. The discovery is not always a welcome one. It seems that I’ve been standing on what Matthew Arnold has called the civilizational foundations of “Athens and Jerusalem.”

By “Athens” Arnold meant the university – the House that Plato built – to protect and sustain the disciplined search for truth.

By “Jerusalem,” I would guess he meant whatever houses the whole of us – the emotional, moral and spiritual person – living in the presence of an Authoritative Witness who sees and cares about each of us.

That being the civilizational foundation, what did I make of the spectacle of academics celebrating the Jewish suffering of October 7th and 8th, 2023? Very simply, I could not make sense of it. I could not find my footing in a world like that.

All I know how to do, in the face of this un-doing of civilizational foundations is suffer – and of course –

bear witness.

Who am I to write on this topic? I’m certainly not among the many scholars, Jewish and Christian, who have tried to reconstruct the cultural surround – the assumptions, references and experiences – that made up the atmosphere Jesus took for granted and worked to influence. Still less would I like to trace the development of doctrines within the Jesus movement or track its relation to what the historical Jesus believed and taught.

What then would I like to see emerge out of a visit to the real-life Jesus, if I could do that? Well, as readers of this column know, I would like to roll back the strange, new-to-me-in-this-life tidal wave of hatred that has crashed over Jews on planet earth since the atrocities visited on Israelis on October 7th and 8th of 2023. As if it needed only the scent of Jewish vulnerability to prompt – what shall I call it – atrocity-envy?

Philosophers like to go back to the beginnings of a problem that comes trailing a history. Who was Jesus, actually?

For light on this interesting question, I’ve been reading A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, by the respected scholar John P. Meier. Part Two of Vol. II, “Message,” deals specifically with what Jesus taught, as best we can reconstruct it. Meier notes both the overlaps and the deviations from what later became Christian doctrine. Jesus was of course a Jew before he became the figure embedded in Christian doctrine. What can we make of that?

Three questions and likely answers emerge from Meier’s careful survey of the available evidence regarding Jesus, as well as the range of scholarly opinion about that evidence:

1 What did Jesus think of his achievement, when he looked back over his life and mission at the time of the Last Supper?

2. What was Jesus’ view of human history?

3. What is original in the teaching of Jesus?

Let’s start with #1, the Last Supper. Here is Meier: “As Jesus comes into the Last Supper, he is faced with the fact that his ministry, from a human point of view, has been largely a failure. All Israel has not heeded his message and accepted him as the eschatological prophet sent from God. Worse still, the bankruptcy of his life-project may be completed by the bankruptcy of his life, as the possibility of a violent death looms. [307f]”

Supposing Meier reads the event accurately, what would I make of Jesus misreading the success and the failure factors in his life at the moment when he sensed how it would end?

Perhaps it should tell us something about success and failure in our own lives. First, we should ask the right questions. What, so far, have we been seeking to do in our lives? Did we do the best we knew how, even if failure piled on failure? Have we learned at least some of what we hoped to learn? If so – and not taking the future for granted – our lives have been a success!

Now on to #2, Human History and what Jesus thought of it. Here’s Meier again. The “historical Jesus did expect a future coming of God’s kingdom … surmounting this world’s barriers of time, space, hostility between Jews and Gentiles, and finally death itself! [317]” However, “he did not specify any timetable or time limit for this coming. [348]”

So Jesus, like most of us, wanted to get above this world and out of this world – but also wanted to take the best of this world with him on the final voyage up and out. Such expectations were in the air. Actual history was getting intolerable.

Sound familiar?

Finally, let’s go to #3, where we ask, what’s original or paradigm-shattering in the teachings of Jesus?

Meier reads Jesus as proclaiming that he has made available a new “field of force that is the kingdom of God.” Whoever, in that new field of force, “experiences the power of God transforming his life” – by that very experience – “exists in the kingdom now … .”

So, the longed-for end-time is now. What you waited for, by participating in that field of force, you have.

This upshot seems to me puzzling, mysterious and dramatic. I would like to see my co-religionists uncouple the historical (i.e. the real-life) Jesus from the long train of calumnies linked in Jewish memory to his name.

The original Jesus was ours, after all! We could step back from the past, free him from those who claim to own him by disowning us and after all …

welcome him back home.

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Tonight I want to revisit an experience whose status in modern culture is typically regarded with skepticism. The French call it the stroke of lightning (le coup de foudre). It’s the sudden descent/visitation of romantic love.

It’s not the same as getting into a meaningful relationship charged up by mutual attraction. It’s more like a change that “changes everything.”

Such a syndrome enjoyed recognition in medieval Europe. The whole of Dante’s Divine Comedy was apparently inspired by a wordless encounter with his one irreplaceable Beatrice. The doomed lovers, Tristan and Iseult, exemplified the coup de foudre. In both of these cases, there was no question or realistic possibility of marriage. The lovers were either already married or already affianced to someone else.

Within the medieval frame, the demands of the stroke of lightning and the requirements of actual life in the space-and-time world could not safely intersect. Some scholars have maintained that these stories of lovers-outside-of-history were not so much romantic tales as encoded representations of secret gnostic cults subversive of the doctrines and practices of official Christendom.

When I first read about it in college and later sensed its influence in the erotic dance of Parisian street life, I had no objection to the coup de foudre as such — only to the gnostic features that I sensed must be putting it into conflict with societal norms. If such a conflict were believed to inhere in romantic love, then that very belief would make it virtually impossible to find or retain in real life.

I knew that it wasn’t impossible. But the gnostic features of the literary exemplars made it seem impossible.

Jerry and I had been talking for months by phone, he in D.C. and I in Manhattan, before we met face to face. At that time, he ran an organization in Washington dedicated to the defense of high standards in higher ed, while I and another professor at Brooklyn College of The City University of New York were trying to save the college’s exemplary core curriculum from a novel plan — by which the new college president hoped to make his mark — to focus the curriculum on the borough of Brooklyn! The students knew more about Brooklyn than their professors did. They hadn’t come to Brooklyn College — some from all over the world — to learn about Brooklyn.

Jerry had been a philosophy department chairman, had served as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and he knew what kind of advice to give. I’d been in fights of my own and knew how to act on good advice. That we actually won our fight secured it a front-page story in The Chronicle of Higher Education. It also made several of the New York papers. The New York Post devoted a full-page editorial to the victory.

We had not yet met, but Jerry knew he was in love before I noticed that I was. But when — after an afternoon spent trading life stories over lunch at the Metropolitan Museum — he gave me the briefest goodbye kiss on his way to a taxi — I thought

uh oh.

It was not just a kiss. The balance I had struck in my life at that point might actually be at risk!

Philosophers have techniques for getting above the down-rush of feeling and instead looking at life — even their own lives — through a contemplative lens. Back home, sitting cross-legged on my meditation pad, I drew on a technique developed by the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl for facilitating detachment. You observe your own consciousness without identifying with any of the elements observed in it. You just look — at the whole panorama. I’d done what Husserl called the “phenomenological reduction” before and generally found it instructive. Now, in my present situation, I was prepared to do it again.

But the oddest thing happened. Instead of maintaining the detachment of the observer, I seemed to myself to be falling into what I observed! The way one might tumble into a pit that opens beneath you while you’ve prepared yourself merely to look at it. I tried mentally to hold on to the rim of what seemed to be a cavernous downslide. But my mental grip was not powerful enough to pull me back up.

I was in it. Not above it. Not in any mode of detachment. The world was being repositioned around me, and I was being reconfigured within the new reality.

For better or worse, I have no habit of lying to myself. The question was, now what? I was inside an experience that I could not stand outside of. To what was it calling me?

By stages, I understood — Jerry and I would be realizing — that this love actually had the character of a summons. Whatever we did in response — the changes it might eventually require — would reshape our lives, separately and together.

Had we been deluded — had we mistaken infatuation for love — the result could have been tragic. Had we, on the other hand, decided it would be safer to override the summons of love, we would have mistaken depth for surface, bungled our lives and flattened our future horizons.

We took what had befallen us as leading us aright.

And we weren’t mistaken.

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