"Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column"

Character Witnesses

Posted on May 30, 2023 by Abigail

Psyche Entering Cupid’s Garden.
John William Waterhouse 1903.

Last week’s column reported on work being done by archeologists and historians, Christian and Jewish, in Israel and surrounding lands, to uncover the real state of Jewry at the time of Jesus. My hope, in describing some of these findings, had been to advance the cause of Christian/Jewish reconciliation.

How did I think I could do that? By showing that the message of Jesus was not out of synch with advanced Jewish thinking at that time. Also that one key reason for tension between the synagogues in the Roman empire and the Jesus missionaries had to do with concerns that were more practical than theological.

You know,

can’t we all

just get along?

This is not a pipe dream. Believe it or not, I claim to have actually cured two philosophic colleagues (who were, as it happens, my friends) of their routinely casual anti-semitic jokes and remarks. The cure did not come from anything I said. My visible irritation seemed only to amuse them. But something I wrote led them to conclude that they were being stupid. Philosophers hate to be caught being stupid. They just stopped doing what they’d been doing around me. So, in my own personal experience, the oldest-hatred-in-recorded-history is curable!

That said, did my column of last week advance the cause of inter-faith reconciliation? Nah, not even by a millimeter. No doubt I’ve vastly overrated my powers and vastly underestimated the scope – and perhaps the nature – of the problem.

The reactions brought back memories of returning from my first visit to Israel and attempting to tell people about my trip. Had I come back from any other place on the planet, my travelogue would have found listeners. But, of that sole place, NOBODY wanted to hear a single solitary word. Not even my hairdresser!

Had I tried to report, let us say, some unheard of sex practices that I’d stumbled across, people would’ve snickered behind their hands but bent down to hear the forbidden secrets. Only in the Israel case, where I had nothing scandalous to report, did I encounter such strenuously maintained incuriosity. I remember saying at the time that we needed to reconceive the Freudian account of “repression.” There really is such a thing as repression – but it’s not about sex!

Obviously, there was something I hadn’t understood. I’d been naive. Hegel would have understood it better than I did. A culture can be deciphered in terms of whatever, for that culture, constitutes the absolute. A theology is (among other things) a portrait of such an absolute. These definitions and portrayals don’t confine themselves to some rarefied upper tier of the culture visited only by specialists. To remain who they are while taking in new experiences, individuals within any culture are perpetually organizing and reorganizing themselves. That’s what people do. Their processes of personal self-organization are enmeshed with the values of their culture and the story told in the culture to justify those values.

The culture’s justificatory story is not optional. No more than mother’s milk is optional for the new-born. The theological version of the culture’s story can be disbelieved – for example, by the atheist or the wholly secularized person. What it can’t be is ignored.

What actually surprised me was how crucial a part was played in the Christian theological story by a supposed Jewish refusal of Jesus during his lifetime. Here I’m not at all referring to claims about the ontological status of Jesus – whether human, divine, or somehow both. Only about the relations of Jesus with his Jewish contemporaries.

Anyway, the adverse reactions to my well-intentioned efforts left me feeling rather bad. Which is hard to distinguish from the fear that one has been a bad person.

So – to change the entire subject and mindset – I got a Lyft taxi to a riding stable I know that is way above the ordinary run of stables. The horses are Arabians, beautiful and beautifully cared for. Beyond that, the young woman who supports my neurologically-challenged hour in the saddle has an ability to sense what the horse has to tell the rider, and to repeat it in good English to the rider. You can scoff all you want, but I’ve never heard truer insights from any licensed therapist than those I get, more often than not, from the horses I ride there!

There is also a dog named Legacy who belongs to the stable. Don’t ask me why, but Legacy loves me. Nor are his affections indiscriminate or promiscuous. I’m told that one time the stable had hired a man for some repair work who, as the owners learned eventually, was not honest. Strikingly, Legacy had needed no time at all to figure him out, but at once snarled, growled and tried to bite him on the ankle.

Never before had a mid-sized, hairy dog climbed up on my lap and snuggled up to me to be petted – but you can bet I felt highly honored.

After about half an hour on Dusty – the chestnut gelding I rode at a stately walk – was understood to have asked if I liked him! No horse I ever rode in my life took me seriously enough to care in the least whether I liked him.

You can keep your Nobel prizes, your Pulitzers, and your awards for moderating Interfaith Dialogues.

Dusty and Legacy are

what I call

character witnesses.

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Theological Rivalry

Posted on May 23, 2023 by Abigail

The other day, Jerry said to me over brunch, “Why don’t Jews move to claim Jesus as their own?”

I thought about that a minute, then answered, “The evangelicals are the most significant American voting bloc that still supports Israel. It would offend them if Israelis ‘welcomed home’ a Jesus who didn’t come attached to Pauline doctrines.” (I had in mind Original Sin and expiation for that through the crucifixion of Jesus — who is understood as God incarnate. So far, I’ve not seen either of these doctrines even indexed in any Jewishly-authored, authoritative book on Judaism.)

But then I thought, after all, maybe that’s not too daunting an obstacle. Maybe, despite all the unspeakably sad history — the theology of contempt and the politics of persecution — maybe a slow change is under way. Some of it may be occurring on the level of theology, but more probative are the changes taking place on the real ground where “the historical Jesus” — in contrast to “the Christ of faith” — actually lived and died.

Israeli scholars and archeologists are teaming up with their Christian counterparts to unearth the concrete circumstances and controversies of Roman-occupied Judea and of the synagogues in the non-Jewish communities of the surrounding Roman empire. More and more, the blanks are being filled in.

For civilizational self-understanding –

and possible renewal –

this is an exciting time.

Item: were the Jews of that time, who lived outside Judea, narrow-minded, xenophobic and closed in upon themselves, as is sometimes charged? I don’t know Paula Fredriksen’s religious affiliation, but she’s got a Viking name. Her book, When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation tells the different story uncovered by recent archeology. The names of synagogue sponsors, engraved on their ancient walls, included leading non-Jewish officials like mayors and their deputies. Festivals of the Jewish calendar year were observed publicly, with townsfolk and local notables participating.

Not having any doctrine of Original Sin, nor its accompanying doctrine of universal damnation, Jews in non-Jewish communities felt no spiritual obligation to try to convert these “Friends of God,” as they called Gentile sympathizers to Judaism. Many rabbis held that “the righteous among the Gentiles has a share in the world to come.” It was a different story when envoys from the new Jesus movement began to make inroads on that Gentile population. The Jesus people did require total commitment, which included giving up all pagan practices. The effective missionary efforts of the Jesus followers drained synagogues of political backing and financial support. Conflict and mutual recriminations followed predictably.

Item: was Jesus the first to perform miracles? Like Paula Fredriksen, David Flusser – a Jewish Israeli – held a professorship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Right now, I’m reading his book, Jesus. Like Rabbi Irving Greenberg who spoke on the topic in my presence – and like me – Flusser had no difficulty believing that Jesus worked miracles or rose from the dead.

Under the laws of nature such things aren’t possible, you say? How should I know what’s possible under the laws of nature? I haven’t taken the complete inventory of nature’s laws nor do I know whether all of them are physical. If you do, good for you!

Flusser tells that miracle workers were revered as intimates of God – the way the body servant of a king is deemed closer to his lord than even the highest court official. As a miracle worker, Jesus was clearly outstanding, though Flusser names a number of others of the period, who are still remembered for the miracles they did.

In fact, Flusser himself was so obsessed with, and in love with Jesus that (as I was once told by an Israeli colleague) his colleagues at Hebrew University used prankishly to call him on the phone pretending to be Jesus.

Item: was all-inclusive love, as one of God’s requirements, unheard of until introduced by Jesus? Flusser cites a number of contemporary sources that show “the new sensitivity of the Jews in the Greek and Roman period” where “[b]ecause of the difficulty of knowing how far God’s love and mercy extended, many concluded that one ought to show love and mercy to all, both righteous and wicked. In this they would be imitating God himself.” What is unique in Jesus is not the teaching of unbounded love per se, but its intensity — and perhaps its manifest embodiment in that teacher.

Item: did Jews abandon Jesus at the time of his arrest? Was the mob that shouted “crucify him!” representative of Jewish opinion at that moment in time? Or were they a mere motley crew mostly incited by the same priests who had turned him over to the Romans? Flusser points out that, according to gospel accounts, temple guards had been reluctant to arrest Jesus in broad daylight – even though he was overturning currency-exchange tables and openly creating a violent disturbance – because they feared the outnumbering crowds that followed him.

Incidentally, Flusser thinks that the self-serving Judas was unlikely to have hanged himself but that he certainly would have had to leave town in a hurry. (As in, if you’ve turned a Jew over to the Romans, don’t let the sun set on you in Jerusalem.)

For reasons rather too intricate for me to recap here, Flusser finds the account of the crucifixion in Luke’s gospel more likely to be accurate than the ones in the other gospels and Luke (who elsewhere is no friend of the Jews) describes “the sympathy of the Jewish crowd at the crucifixion …” (See Luke 23:26-27.) As for the priests, who condemned Jesus and incited the mob outside Pilate’s headquarters, they belonged to the sect of Sadducees, which denied the afterlife, expected no messiah, were widely disliked as collaborationist and cruel, and did not survive as a Jewish denomination after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E.

What’s the upshot? Here’s how Flusser sums up his findings: “Perhaps tension between Christians and Jews and Jewry was once historically necessary for the development of Christianity as an independent religion. Now the scaffolding can confidently, but unfortunately too late, be removed. … Anti-Judaism stood godfather to the formation of Christianity. We have tried to show this on the basis of one example [the sympathetic Jewish crowds], and through this wanted to do our Christian brothers a good service.”

I couldn’t have said it better.

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Book Matters

Posted on May 16, 2023 by Abigail

“Young Girl Reading”
Seymour Joseph Guy, 1877

Philosopher’s Holiday

by Irwin Edman (Viking 1938, Penguin Books 1943)

This is the sort of book that doesn’t get written these days, brought into being by the sort of man who doesn’t himself get produced any more.

Irwin Edman was a philosopher, essayist, and pretty good poet – with the kind of sensibility that gives itself room enough to stretch to the limit of its power to feel and observe. He taught philosophy at Columbia University, being of the generation old enough to have been teaching when my father (class of 1925) was an undergraduate there. In fact, his reminiscences include a passing reference to a student who could only have been my father: “the withering cynic of his class, whose god was [Jonathan] Swift” and who, despite all that, surprisingly became “a mystical and fanatical rabbi.”

I very much doubt my father would have endorsed that portrait. He always grinned, as if at something irresistibly comical, whenever the name of Irwin Edman came up.

The author’s reminiscences include a brief glimpse of New York City (my home town) in the years 1900 – 1910, when he was a boy. He “grew up … in simple gemutlich Manhattan, through which one could cheerfully ride a bicycle from the farms in outlying Harlem to Forty Second Street and Fifth Avenue … that friendly simple town … full of brownstone houses … and German beer gardens … open-air trolleys that took on exciting adventures … of the neighbors … shouting ‘Get a horse’ to goggled automobilists” and so on and on into the fabled past. One time, he records being stopped by a “ragamuffin about my own age” who demanded that he “Gimme all you got.” Our author was about to deliver his entire fortune, which came to twenty-five cents in coin, when “with some singular surge of moral scruple,” he asked the young tough, “’what do you want to do with it?’” When he was told that it would go to buy cigarettes, young Edman urged his assailant not to spend it that way. “They’re coffin nails,’ I said; ‘they’re bad for you, and you’ll die early. You really oughtn’t to smoke, you know.’” At that, the would-be junior mugger returned it all — the watch, the fountain pen and the twenty-five cents — and thereafter told his buddies in crime to leave young Edman alone. Our professor of philosophy comments with wry realism: “It’s the only moral conquest I can remember making.”

We get a picture of the Columbia College of Edman’s student days. His teachers included Frederick J. E. Woodbridge who “educated a whole generation of students in philosophy … [including] Morris Cohen and Sidney Hook and J. H. Randall, Jr. and Herbert Schneider.” I asked Jerry about Woodbridge. He was, Jerry said, a naturalist of the common sense variety, not the “throw the furniture overboard to lighten the ship” kind of naturalist. He had no hesitation in quoting poetry, great literature or scripture. He revived interest in Aristotle, who had long been dismissed as of antiquarian interest only. He founded the Journal of Philosophy, one of the premier philosophical journals. He didn’t require that an object be put to a practical test, or set one to problem-solving, in order to be worth attending to. His was a summons to intellectual vision.

Woodbridge and John Dewey were the most influential and honored teachers of their time, which extended from the beginning of the twentieth century into its first three or four decades. As Dewey’s student, Edman underwent a kind of about face. Dewey lectured without eloquence, “very slowly in a Vermont drawl … and … hardly seemed aware of the presence of a class.” It was only when Edman looked over his notes after class that he discovered, “what had seemed so casual, so rambling, so unexciting, was of an extraordinary coherence, texture, and brilliance. … Not every day or in every teacher does one overhear the palpable processes of thought.”

Aside from its portraits of a vanished New York, his teachers and later students, the chapters also range and rove over the experiences of an attentive and thoughtful traveler in the time between the two world wars. The book’s original publication date was 1938. “We came to look … even on the living world of Europe with something of the aesthetic traveler’s eyes with which we viewed its past. We gathered vaguely from the newspapers on the Continent that there were ominous matters afoot … armies of occupation and starved populations … [but] somehow, to one bemused young American at least, these things at the time seemed more unreal than the beautiful surface of the past by which one’s eyes and imagination were enriched.”

Though the author cautions against using these surfaces of the past – or for that matter, the tokens of an imagined utopian future – for escapist purposes, even so, at the end he rather celebrates the refreshment afforded by what he is not ashamed to call “the Ivory Tower.” By that he means the inner refuge where, if only for a season, one may “love art in the sense of loving life where it is at once rich and clear” and where “one must retreat to the Ivory Tower for refreshment or for understanding” or “perhaps deserting the realm of philosophy for that of poetry, and exact analysis for the pleasures of a waking dream.”

What shall I say in conclusion about this intelligently detached revisiting of what is now a bygone era? The author has shown personal toughness sufficient to protect his own rather delicate and wide-ranging sensibility.

I respect that.

Posted in book reviews, books | Tagged Irwin Edman's Philosopher's Holiday | Leave a comment

My Body in the Culture Wars

Posted on May 9, 2023 by Abigail

Susanna and the Elders by Rembrandt ca. 1650.

Hegel would say that culture wars occur where there are opposing claims to define the culture – have the final say, the last word – decide what determines “the absolute” for that culture. Depending on where you find yourself on such battlefields, you’ll regard your body’s possibilities differently.

Suppose, for example, you found yourself in a verbal combat with Donald Trump. Imagining yourself to be in an ordinary debate, you might hope to catch Trump asserting and denying the same thing (contradicting himself) or overlooking some fact that would refute one of his sweeping generalizations. Meanwhile, while you were thinking of moves in a normal argument, he would be ridiculing your height, your energy level, or – if you’re a woman – the chance that you’d be menstruating or not sufficiently attractive to be worth raping.

Anyone old enough to be reading this column has been carefully taught not to speak that way to anyone! If my inner child ever said such insulting words – even silently – she sure is out of practice by now.

It’s not that one’s frozen stupefaction can’t thaw in time to find some riposte. It’s that, to do so effectively, one must first realize that

this combat isn’t verbal.

To begin with, try to intuit what any animal would sense instantly: where is my body? where is his body? what does my body know about the space he is filling? where are the holes in that space? what is the filled-in part of the space-of-his-body doing? suggesting? or about to do? Don’t cringe. Don’t cower. Don’t freeze. If you do, he’ll think he won. And he’ll be right.

Let’s move along to a higher level and a different kind of confrontation. Today I read an article titled “Vulnerability in America” by Jennie Lightweis-Goff. In the opening sentence, the writer informs her readers that her yoga teacher beheaded his girlfriend. I’ll omit the additional details. Most of the essay goes on to discuss how such crimes get rated from the point of view of the publicity and public interest that they draw. White victims score higher than victims of color, while black on black crimes get the lowest attention scores. When that phenomenon first came to light, it drew disapproval from the very media that was in the business of generating high viewer scores. The writer speculates that another factor likely augments media attention and viewer interest: public depravity. She also supposes that the publicity afforded such crimes has served to discourage women from asserting their recently-won legal rights to participate in the life — work and recreation — of society.

Along the way, we learn that the writer has had relationships with men that included some element of risk. At the end of the essay, we learn that the writer now teaches in a prison and cycles alone at night. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

The lesson I draw from this hodge podge of an essay is that, as W. B. Yeats says,

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

What convictions do I find lacking in “Vulnerability in America”? First, the conviction that murder is evil. It’s a point she raises only to disavow the term “evil.” Contra Lightweis-Goff, the act of murder is not “structural.” It’s not traceable to an indefinitely long chain of causes. It ought not to be done. The heart of the murderer ought to prohibit the murder. In the case that opens her essay, there are compounding factors that aggravate the evil. First, he murdered a woman who was close to him, which betrayed her trust and their intimacy. Second, the skill of a yoga teacher involves harmonizing the relations between mind and body. This murderer betrayed what appears to have been the very calling of his life. To fail to underscore these points and instead lead us through a phenomenology of depravity with pretend neutrality is to confuse the reader.

The body language of confusion invites predators.

A book I just finished reading, While Time Remains by Yeonmi Park deals with other pitfalls on the champ de bataille of the culture wars. The author escaped from North Korea, which suffers under what is surely one of the worst regimes on our planet. She made her way through perils and brutal degradations almost beyond telling (though the journey is described in her previous book), and now lives as an American citizen. Her English is impeccable, her intelligence not easily befuddled and she strikes me as unusually observant and capable. She sees the country with fresh eyes and this makes her an interesting guide.

She gets to the point of enrolling in Columbia College as a freshman, where she will take the required courses of the college’s core liberal arts program. “In the four years I ended up spending at Columbia, professors in the humanities frequently challenged us to demonstrate how woke we were. … Worse than a bad grade was to be labeled by one’s classmates a ‘SIX HIRB’: a sexist, intolerant xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist bigot.” To say the least, this was disappointing, since she’d already spent her early years in North Korean classrooms showing how facilely she could echo the propaganda of her teachers in that tyrannical regime. To have to respond to analogous pressures here was as morally painful to endure as it was mentally easy to do.

(Though no comparable political pressures were applied in my grad school days at Columbia, I do remember taking Grad Record Exams in philosophy – either while or just before I enrolled there – and passing them with grades so high they were off-the-chart. How did I do that? Easy. The answers to the questions were multiple choice and they all looked wrong to me. I checked the front cover to see who wrote the exams in philosophy. Recognizing the names and the philosophical preferences attached to those names, I gave only the wrong answers preferred by those professors.)

What do you want me to have done? Give the wrong answers they didn’t prefer? Get up and walk out?

Back to our remaining question: what is going on, body-wise and mind-wise, when a dissenter draws the notice of a mob? Well, it’s very much harder to disarm a hostile crowd than to do that with a single individual who refuses to argue fairly. Though I’ve seen it described and even watched it on video – brought about on a small scale by individuals who were visibly fearless – in most cases it’s not like confronting a single adversary with a body that belongs to him alone, which might be scanned. It’s not one girl looking at a few hornets. It’s a swarm.

Here’s what I think: you keep your head down and just keep on keeping on. But for God’s sake — and above all —

DON’T APOLOGIZE!

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How I Grew Up, Eventually

Posted on May 2, 2023 by Abigail

Abbie at 10 on Prince.

I never wanted to grow up. In fact, one of my childhood heroes was Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up. For one thing, I thought grownups were ugly. They were too big, which prevented them from getting around easily.

One time, I remarked on this to my father, telling him that I felt sorry for grownups, because they couldn’t run and play.

“If adults wanted to run and play,” he responded, “they would.”

I sincerely doubted this. To do it properly, you had to be of a certain size. Not too big, not too small. There was one other thing I didn’t like about adults. They would put their overlarge faces, every pore of which was apparent to me, very close to my small face, and then grimace in a way they seemed to believe was charming to me. Then they would ask me some question, to which they obviously knew the answer. Like, how old are you? Privately I resolved never to do that to a child, in the event that I too should ever have to grow up.

Let’s bracket the high seas of adolescence. We can call that stretch of years, “Growing Up and Not Liking It” — to paraphrase the title of a pamphlet on the joys of being a teenager — for example the fun of getting ready for prom night — put out by a company that manufactured sanitary napkins. Though I never got asked to a prom, I pondered the pamphlet as did all the girls I knew. Some of them were certainly better at negotiating the rigors of growing up and liking it than I was.

In a way, what I was doing through the early stages of young womanhood was trying very hard to recapture the sense of self-congruence — of fitting neatly into my skin — that my ten-year-old self had taken for granted. The chief reason that, as an untenured assistant professor of philosophy, I risked my job rather than vote for the candidate for department chair backed by the powerful senior bloc, was that I didn’t want to turn into one of those grimacing grownups!

During those years, when I’d be reinstated only to be fired again, my parents were alive and their interesting friends, some lifelong and some of more recent collegial vintage, and my own friends — who included young colleagues as well as friends from earlier years — were like concentric circles keeping my adult life afloat. It really was a lovely world, as I think of it now. It kept some of the continuities of the child I’d been, but continuities now recast in a language that interested me more than I’d anticipated. As it happened, the field of philosophy felt homelike to me.

If any long shadows were gathering, I did not care to see them. Nor did they (the long shadows) care to be seen.

It was only after my father and mother were both gone that the terrain they’d vacated assumed a different look. (When the cat’s away, the mice will play.) This happened by degrees. For example: one of his collegial friends, a philosopher whom my father had brought into his college in the City University of New York system, and who’d even spoken affectingly at the memorial service, began giving talks, in academic venues around town, blasting the Jews, ancient and modern! When I’d met him for lunch hoping to discuss this turn in his thinking, he threatened to stalk out at the very start of our conversation.

Beyond that peculiar incident, another had wider impact in my life. A family member who’d enjoyed friendly but not close acquaintance with my own collegial friends as well as the inherited friendships from the world of my parents, managed to draw off and away from me most of those relationships. That achievement must have required rhetorical and persuasive skills whose dimensions I’m not quite able to fathom. The only ones disinclined to believe what I later learned was an avalanche of defamatory fictions were people from the small town in Downeast Maine where my parents had owned a home fronting the Bay. The townspeople knew who actually paid the bills and attended to repairs. They had no interest in elusive allegations.

The concentric circles that at one time had kept me afloat mostly fell away. I had to fight to publish my father’s posthumous book, fight to secure his papers and get them properly archived, fight to sell the house in Maine when the time came to do that, suffer through the longing for whatever collegial and inherited friendships were now taken from me irretrievably, get such papers of my grandfather, Rav Tsair, as I owned properly archived at Hebrew Union College/Jewish Institute of Religion, and meanwhile fight to reconstitute the health jeopardized by all those combats. Any relationships or friendships still retained were either formed or reconfirmed by me as my own. They were not inheritances.

What’s the upshot? Well, it’s something like a restored congruence with my original self: the ten-year old. In one way, I did grow up. But in another way — the way of the grimacing mouther-of-words-nobody-can-believe — I’m still

the girl who never grew up.

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Where Is the Happy Ending?

Posted on April 25, 2023 by Abigail

Stories, as I see them, are supposed to come out right. And here’s what I mean by “right.” It’s nothing deep, mysterious or esoteric. Our romantic couple rides off into the Western sunset. They have the time for their trip, because the bad guys – with their unshaven jowls, concave hats and swayback horses – have been left lying dead on the barroom floor. Or else taken off to face Justice in this world.

They won’t try that again – whatever that was. Life should have a rhythm to it. Things should come out right.

That’s how our story had gone by the time Jerry and I first met in person. For half a year at least, we’d been in contact by phone, strategizing (from his position as head of a higher ed organization in D.C. and mine as philosophy professor at Brooklyn College) about how to thwart the college administration’s plan to degrade its award-winning liberal arts program. Against all the probabilities, we succeeded in saving the core curriculum, finally met in person, fell in love and married. Some of the press that had reported our rare academic victory featured our romance as the sequel a year later. The only things missing were the horses.

Some time passed and there were further sequels. Brooklyn College no longer has the core curriculum that we “saved.” More recent reports, from a well-regarded professor whom I trust, tell that the college has become a stamping ground for the new campus anti-semites. Jewish students – who in my day were at ease and self-assertive – now face a situation that is past protesting. They keep their heads down and simply try to survive.

For another example of stories that fail to come out right, let’s take my local temple. I have a history of constructive engagement with it that’s as long as your arm. When I became a temple member over twenty years ago, what was foremost in my mind was concurrently joining its Adult Education Committee.

The first thing I did was bring the great warrior Phyllis Chesler to speak on “The New Anti-Semitism.” Our then rabbi told me that the congregants didn’t like to hear about anti-semitism and I won’t go into the struggle that ensued – a struggle that incidentally did not surprise Phyllis. Over opposition of other kinds, I brought Stephen Spector to speak on his award-winning book about evangelicals and Zionism. For audience, we had about five Jews (not including the rabbi) and thirty-five evangelicals. Anyway, I think the five congregants were at least satisfied that their Christian supporters were not there to try to convert them. I made friends with some of the evangelical attendees and, through them, first encountered Kasim Hafeez, the extremely intelligent and effective former terrorist who now lectures on behalf of Israel. It took me two years to track him, but finally secured his consent to come and speak at our temple. (For that one time, a hand-written card of thanks came in the mail, signed by every member of the Board.)

I was asked to speak in farewell for two rabbis, each departing for different reasons, and I did that. After the first rabbi departed, I served on the search committee that found a successor. When (because it turned out the temple could not pay him) he left, I farewelled him too and we have stayed friends.

When the local museum put on an exhibition that included anti-Jewish cartoons, I got our rabbi to write her – a correspondence that ended with her agreement to get his input on future “controversial” exhibit pieces. I was active in getting the Israel Consul in Philadelphia to participate in a public debate with the local Quakers who, once a week, were holding a one-sided “vigil” against Israel in the center of town. Though, because I’d written about it in my column, I was blamed for the breakdown of a “dialogue” between the vigilantes (my term for them) and some of our congregants – meanwhile the weekly “vigiling” continued on and on.

How did it end? It ended by a miracle, I would say. I joined two of my evangelical friends and Jerry for coffee at the outdoor terrace of Starbucks, fronting the same town square as the vigilers. We read psalms quietly and discussed their meaning, not looking at the vigilers holding their placards nearby. Finally, the four of us joined hands and I addressed the Lord, which I don’t generally do out loud, explaining that I had tried everything – to protect Jewish congregants and townspeople from this weekly defamation ritual – and nothing I tried had changed hearts; all had only gone from bad to worse; everything had failed; now could the Lord please help? I can’t explain what happened but, when we looked up, the vigilers had disappeared quite suddenly and they’ve never returned.

Back to our story: after BDS (the movement to “Boycott, Divest and Sanction” – but only do it to the Jewish state) got approved at the highest levels of the Presbyterian Church USA, a few of us went over with our rabbi to talk to the local Presbyterians. Their historic church included a fine minister and his bellicose congregants. First, our rabbi took questions – like arrows one after another – with grace, humility and candor. From my seat in a front pew, I too made a short speech. It began with the question, “Why did God give the Jews a Land?”

For our young people, there was also my strenuous but unsuccessful attempt to get the temple to invite expert speakers from StandWithUs to brief them on the hurdles they may well have to face on college campuses today.

The last fight I fought for the temple went better, but not in the way of the old Westerns. It was my fight to oust a predator who was relating “inappropriately” (as they say) to women congregants. With Jerry’s help and God’s, we were eventually successful, but not before suffering one of those classic reprisals that get delivered to the whistle-blower – particularly if she is a woman – they saw me as the problem.

When, over time, I began to feel more and more acutely the traumatic effects of this not-so-fine finale, I decided to stay away from all temple activities for some months. Finally, encouraged mainly by the temple’s new and gifted woman rabbi, I felt it would be okay to return – at least for the weekly study by Zoom.

And the leadership? The woman rabbi who had been so encouraging was not reappointed. So far as I can tell, by now there is no one who can or would remember the not-so-short story I just told here.

Over brunch this morning, I shared with Jerry a summary of these broken-off-stories-that-didn’t-end-right. Prompted by my recollections, he had his own tales to tell – that could easily match mine.

It seems there is no necessary connection between a good story and a happy ending! Eternal vigilance isn’t just the price of liberty. It’s the sine qua non for happy endings – and we can’t keep watch over every story in which we may have played a good part.

What’s the moral, then? The rabbis say that righteous deeds raise a barrier against what would otherwise be the floodtide of chaos. They tell of 36 righteous people for whose sake the world is … what? Allowed to continue!

Not to be redeemed, only to continue! Because of acts that put things back in order – the world we live in remains intelligible. We can see how it ought to go. Or how it should have gone. We have a metric: the mitzvah or righteous deed. Absent the mitzvah, we would not know the difference between

how things are

and how things ought to be.

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Reluctant Inferences

Posted on April 18, 2023 by Abigail

The crime scene after the murder of Moritz Schlick
at the philosophers’ staircase of the University of Vienna in 1936.
Austrian National Library, Picture Archives Contemporary History.

This is the evening when I usually pen the weekly essay for “Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column.” Till I take pen in hand, I never know exactly what I’m going to write. Often, I don’t even know the topic! So what you read is not anything I’ve planned in advance. But normally, by the time I’m putting pen to paper, the sense of what there is for me to say comes to me.

There are a few controlling principles: I won’t write anything where I pretend interest contrived for this purpose, nor anything I believe to be false.

What’s on my mind this evening is difficult to write about. In recent years, I’ve given papers at meetings of the Eric Voegelin Society, which meets with the American Political Science Association. Its members are devoted to the study and continuation of the work of Eric Voegelin (1901-1985). He was an immensely erudite, productive and creative thinker — a near-genius somewhere between political scientist and philosopher of history.

Narrowly escaping the Gestapo in an Austria engulfed in Nazism, he valued America for embodying an intellectual openness and common sense that, to his mind, compensated for the European scholar’s erudite intellectual systems. What stood out in Voegelin was another quality, however. He looked to discover — in the widely different cultural phases of world history — the spiritual springs of thought and action.

Such an orientation is uncommon among contemporary political scientists, historians or philosophers of history. Perhaps for that reason, the EVS attracts refined and accomplished academics and others. When they meet to hear papers and converse, there is a sense of finding refuge from the storms of skepticism, cynicism and crass know-it-all-ism raging outside.

Which brings me to my present discomfort. Recently, I’ve become aware of passages about Jews in Voegelin’s Israel and Revelation, volume one of his five volume Order and History, for which “regrettable” would be the politest word. It’s odd that I seem to be the first person who’s been struck to the heart by these passages. They stand out, incongruous where they appear on the page. This is partly because Voegelin became a particular target of the Nazis by reason of books he had written criticizing Nazi race theories. What is more, he belonged to an outstanding intellectual circle in Vienna that included a number of Jews. He surely knew from experience how easily words that deny the cultural or spiritual worth of a people (words like “demonic derailment” or “hatred of mankind” or “grotesque result of post exilic synoecism” or “suicidal impasse”) can slide into rationales for mass murder. Why he permitted such vilifications to survive an author’s rereading of his original draft is beyond me. Did he just write in a stream-of-conscious way and then send the uncorrected draft off to the publisher?

One possible reason why, up to now, no sincere seeker from the EVS has dealt with this matter occurs to me. The anti-Jewish insults get folded into the Voegelin text at widely dispersed intervals in a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t manner. That’s a phenomenon I dealt with in one previous instance. The political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote a book titled, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. The gist of her “report” was that Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi officer who, more than any other, got the Holocaust planned and implemented, was a mere mindless, boring bureaucrat, while his victims (about five million out of the six million total) were so needlessly compliant as to be practically complicit in their own genocide. The two claims, both of them false and misleading, took hold immediately and widely in the culture. No wonder! Taken together, they got everybody off the hook except the silent dead.

I am of course not accusing Voegelin of writing any book like Arendt’s Eichmann. The similarity that came to mind had to do with the style of the slur. What style was that? With regard to her accusations against the victims, Arendt followed a strategy that deflected critical assault. She would say and then unsay the same thing, denouncing in one paragraph and then exonerating a few paragraphs later. So her critics could point to what she said, and her defenders to the passages where she unsaid it! The dispute would end in a draw. You could not sustain an intelligible charge. And after all, quarrelsomeness sounds shrill, self-serving and petty. By the time, years later, information surfaced that decisively overturned Arendt’s case, all the original parties to the dispute were dead and the whole topic was out of fashion.

That said, Arendt’s book was a lot shorter than Voegelin’s volume one. It was refutable, if one took the trouble to compare it to the Eichmann trial transcript and to Eichmann’s recorded reminiscences in Argentina that came to light later. By contrast, Voegelin’s work takes in evidences that span a period of several thousand years and include a succession of scholarly opinions. So the say-it-and-later-unsay-it strategy is harder to unearth and is found only in isolated sentences, strung across unrelated evidential layers of different types and purposes.

Such were the reasons not to challenge Voegelin’s authority. The more I reread his text and saw that his claims are never easy to controvert — because they are peculiarly hard to identify — the less confident I felt about what I might set out to do. After all, nobody’s paying me to do anything about Voegelin’s claims regarding the religion of Israel, Jews or Judaism, pre-exilic, post-exilic or post-Biblical! I could lose valued collegial friends. There are countless counter-examples that readers could point to, even if elsewhere there are examples in a different vein. Give it up, girl! You have all your academic ribbons. You don’t need an extra line on your c.v. And nobody needs a paper from you at the next EVS meetings.

Feeling disheartened and decentered, I decided to cut off work for the evening and go downstairs to catch a little TV. Perhaps because Yom ha Shoah is approaching, I happened to click on a program featuring a Holocaust survivor. He’d been just a boy when his country (Roumania I think) was overrun by the Nazis. His parents were farmers and their pre-War relations with neighboring farmers had been very good. Once a week, the local priest would drop in to ask for a charitable contribution which his father unfailingly donated. Till one day the same priest stood outside in their yard with several Nazi officers.

“Jews live there,” they heard him say.

I take “coincidences” like this to invite attention. Authority – even well earned authority – can lend itself to bad uses. It seemed to me that I was being shown this recollection to remind me that all this was not about fitting smoothly into a certain collegial society. The inferences I was drawing about the consequences of defamatory words were correct. They were the right ones to draw.

It was my duty to go ahead with my paper for the Eric Voegelin Society.

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Authenticity Adios

Posted on April 11, 2023 by Abigail

Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir with Boris and Michelle Vian at the Cafe Procope, 1952.

The philosopher who first brought “authenticity” to public notice was, I believe, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). According to a recent book, Tyranny and Revolution by Waller Newell, Heidegger’s notion went like this: you and I are to be grasped as localizations of Being – hence Heidegger’s term for us, Dasein – being there. In case you expected that so vast a foundation would give us depth and stability, think again! Being itself is shot through and through with temporality (time’s passage).

To get to the point about authenticity: it’s only reached when our very fleetingness is faced square on, along with awareness that we’re headed toward the end of ourselves (Being-Toward-Death).

So what’s inauthentic, for Heidegger? It would be any assumption that we live in an environment that’s stable and solid. Gossip relies on such an assumption. So do conventional opinions. Ordinary obituaries and condolences carry that implication. They convert the uncanniness at the bottom of human existence into “news” – something seeming familiar and commonplace.

All this sounds pretty deep, does it not? Many people take it that way. Whether or not they like him, Heidegger is widely conceded to be gifted, original and – in his own special way – authentic.

The fact that he joined the Nazi Party in 1933 – telling all the students in his class who were Jewish to get out, sending a termination of status notice to Edmund Husserl (his former teacher who’d got him the professorship at Freiburg) and backing Nazi policies that would have got Husserl murdered together with Hannah Arendt, Heidegger’s former student and lover (if the first had not died and the second escaped) – did not strike him as deleting anything from his authenticity.

I recall mentioning some of these awkward details during a seminar I taught on existentialism and being scolded by a student for my “judgmentalism.” Judgmentalism? Since I’d never slept with any student, nor with my professors, nor tried to get any murdered, this student had a point. Don’t judge someone if you haven’t walked a mile in his moccasins. Or his lederhosen.

Be that as it may, we still have to reckon with the notion of authenticity. Ideas travel. This one crosses into France, where Jean-Paul Sartre makes it his own. Sartre puts more emphasis on its contrary: bad faith (mauvaise foi). Though each of us has recognizable traits of character and style, for Sartre these depend entirely on our own free choice, which we can change at any time. So the waiter who brings our coffee, at our usual hangout on St. Germain des Pres, is in bad faith insofar as he believes he really is – the waiter – at which he plays.

Likewise, in another example from Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, the appealing young woman who has joined someone like Sartre at his café table – he having meanwhile placed his hand on hers – will be in bad faith if she pretends to ignore this little transaction rather than frankly admit her own lusts.

Hmm. I’ve never waited tables but the other incident is as recognizable as it is embarrassing. I can tell you that her main concern will focus on how to slide her hand out from under the hand of a celebrated French intellectual without showing up in a book about bad faith.

Wait a minute! Anecdotes like these can’t possibly add up to all there is to say about authenticity, can they?

Lionel Trilling, one of the leading opinion-shapers of the twentieth century, wrote a book called Sincerity and Authenticity. In it he describes authenticity as a power to resist the opinions of others and instead steer one’s own singular course in life. Citing Sartre’s play, No Exit (Huis Clos), in which a character says, “Hell is other people,” Trilling finds “the infernal outcome of modern social existence” to lie in the fact that “the sentiment of individual being depends upon other people.”

Hey, get real! Without other people, we can’t learn to walk on two legs, we can’t acquire language, we’ll fail to acquire the use of the prehensile thumb and … need I go on? At some point along the road of adulthood, we might well find that our integrity requires us to go against the grain of other peoples’ opinions. We’d prefer to do it quietly and not have to pay too much for it. It’s not fun or enviable to have to do it. Inevitably, it’s a choice between greater and lesser evils.

Back to “authenticity.” In my experience, it doesn’t wear well. At one time, the counter-culture descended on the little town in Maine where my parents had a summer home. It was the era of authenticity. The young men worked on their great, abstract, metal sculptures; the young women taught school to pay for the raw materials. One time, visiting one of these rather beautiful young couples, I asked, feeling thirsty, “Do you have running water?”

“Charge you a nickel if I run,” came the wry response, which to me had the very sound – alike dashing and earthy – of authenticity!

A few decades later, I ran into the same couple at a summer art fair. His pony tail had turned grey, the art was no better, and they were looking remarkably like the bourgeois types that long ago they had so attractively repudiated.

I can’t remember ever wanting to be authentic. I just wanted to find out what belonged to me to do in life,

whether or not

it resembled

what other people did.

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What Would Hegel Do?

Posted on April 4, 2023 by Abigail

Napoleon Crossing the Alps by Jacques-Louis David, 1802,
Hegel on Postage Stamp, Germany, 2020.

I called myself a Hegelian for much of my academic career. Though that field is usually assigned to Continental Philosophy, the chair of one highly-regarded – and predominantly Analytic – philosophy department to which I’d applied told me that my candidacy had been seriously considered because, unlike most Hegelians, I actually “did philosophy” in a Hegelian manner instead of treating him as a bygone figure from the (nineteenth-century’s) history of ideas.

To “do philosophy” as Hegel would is to try to pick out the dominant beliefs and concerns of one’s time, and then see if these views are at risk – whether from new evidence or because, once acted on, the results contradicted the stated aims. It’s applying the method of dialectic to current worldviews. It’s something many of us do all the time without thinking to call it “Hegelian.”

A lot of what goes on in life can be clarified when seen under that lens. It helped me cope with the currents of university life. When feminism first came into cultural influence, I taught a course called “Philosophic Foundations of Feminism” and wrote an article for a well-regarded philosophy journal titled, Feminism Without Contradictions. It also allowed me to relish teaching at Brooklyn College, where students from all over the planet brought a wide spectrum of approaches to their philosophic questions. In answering a student, I would try to address the cultural assumptions behind the question. From their expressions (of satisfaction or continued puzzlement) at my reply, I could see whether or not I’d decoded what they really wanted to know!

When and why did I stop calling myself a Hegelian? It was when I needed to pray! There was a moment in my life when I needed help that came down directly – from high above – from a vantage point beyond where I stood. I needed to know which street I should take to get where I was going and when I should walk down it! I was scared, needed help and couldn’t wait for any hypothetically relevant dialectic to work itself out beforehand.

Did that mean I threw philosophy over? Certainly not. Prayer by itself won’t mail a letter. It won’t tie your shoes. It’s not magic. It doesn’t replace real life and the reasonableness called for day by day. Normally you do all you can to help yourself and the situation, though you might ask God for guidance while you do that. Meanwhile, philosophers continue to shed the lights of their intelligence – which itself seems at times inspired. Why not? If music, painting or physics can be inspired, so too can philosophy.

Well then, is our present era open to an Hegelian analysis? A few years back, Frances Fukuyama wrote a book to which he gave the Hegelian title, The End of History and the Last Man. He concluded, much as Hegel had done, that by now the major shapes or phases of consciousness (of dominant cultural opinion) had been traversed and had led humankind to a collective conclusion that representative democracy is the best form of government. It’s the form in which all citizens are recognized as bearers of rights, equal in dignity and capable of responsible decision-making. This highest form of government admits variations suitable to the diverse histories and cultures of citizens from every part of the globe. But its basic character cannot be bettered. All the alternatives have been tried and found wanting. Sooner or later every people, every nation, will get there.

The current battle to save democratic Ukraine appears to support Fukuyama’s view. The democratic world seems to have found its mirror in that fight and – thanks to its improbable actor-turned-Churchillian-statesman Zelenskyy – is actually closing ranks and shipping arms. Who would have believed it? Or predicted it?

On the other hand, what else is presently going on that would tend to refute Fukuyama’s view? Oddly and for some time, a wave of skepticism has been sweeping through the educated classes. Whether from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, Volumes I-III, or from an array of Parisian postmodern advocates, the dizzying conclusions have been that all objective disciplines and lines of research – whether psychological, biological, physical, cognitive, expressive-aesthetic or spiritual – should be recast as social constructs explainable in terms of the underlying brute power relations that they disguise or rationalize.

What else tells against Fukuyama’s view? There is a related effort on the part of Western intellectuals to acknowledge a history of power unfairly exerted over non-Western peoples. The battles by which Europe was secured against Muslim conquest at Poitiers in 732 A.D., at Lepanto in 1571 and at the Gates of Vienna in 1683, are of course glossed over. More recent jihadist efforts to undo those defeats are being read as reprisals for Western hegemony.

What would Hegel say or do about those features of contemporary culture and history that look like evidence against the resolution that Fukuyama foresaw? He might note that, insofar as today’s skeptics, nihilists and revolutionaries draw on Nietzsche and Marx, they use Western categories and views while pretending to decry them, just as more violent enemies may borrow Western technology in order to destroy the cultural resources that produced it. So the West’s opponents actually rely on what they claim to repudiate.

There is a relatively new development that doesn’t figure as such in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind: instant mass communication, often using images lifted out of context, accompanied by manipulative speech appealing to instinctual, old-brain layers of whose workings we may be unaware. The consequence is mob action and demagogic rule, whether from the left or from the right. Reasoned opinion-forming is quickly eroded and efforts to resist or undo the damage can be worrisomely slow by comparison.

Was Hegel aware of this recent threat? He wrote of the French Revolution’s reign of terror, where political and social structures were erased in order to achieve “absolute freedom” instantly. The lesson he drew, that effective political action requires – not direct democracy – but representative government to mediate competing desires and intentions, allowing them to be resolved in regular and deliberative ways, seems like the right lesson. So, neither the dangers nor the remedies seem beyond the reach of an Hegelian analysis.

Is there more to the story of human history than Hegel writes about? Certainly, but today we were only going to talk about

what Hegel would do.

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Call No Woman Happy

Posted on March 28, 2023 by Abigail

Marie Antoinette on her way to the Guillotine.
Sketched by Jacques-Louis David, October 16, 1793

In his Histories, Herodotus tells the tale of a certain King Croesus of Lydia (reigned 585-547 BCE) who boasted of his happiness to a guest, the wise Solon. The guest warned him that – given life’s uncertainties – no one should be deemed “happy” until he is, safely and finally, dead. Eventually, the Persian king Cyrus conquered Lydia and set its former king on a pyre to be burned. From the fire, Croesus was heard to cry, “Solon! Solon!” Curious to learn why the doomed man called out that name, Cyrus got him out of the fire, listened to his story and decided to spare his life.

The tale was proverbial in classical times, but Aristotle added a qualification in the Nicomachean Ethics: no man should be called happy even after his death, since the deceased can still suffer, for example, when evils befall his descendants. A further reversal is possible, that Aristotle did not mention: it could happen that years after a person’s death someone, a biographer or historian perhaps, could uncover evidence that the deceased had a blameworthy secret – not known or else not considered discreditable at the time of his death.

America’s Founding Fathers stand out as a prominent recent case of that kind. Laid to rest with full honors by a grateful nation, but lately discovered (or rather acknowledged) to have been complicit in the regime of ante-bellum slavery, at this writing, their reassessments are ongoing.

What is it about the word “happy” that feels like a ticking time bomb? My father, Henry M. Rosenthal, was among the graduates of the celebrated Columbia College class of 1925. He and his friends were devoted students of Mark Van Doren, the poet, writer and Professor in the English Department, who taught them how to read literature and how to write. Students close to Van Doren stayed in touch with him through the years, seasonally exchanging wry and poetic greetings.

In 1958, Van Doren published an Autobiography, where he described himself as “a happy man.” My father, whose spiritual sensibility was pretty keen, immediately recoiled. Intuitively, he felt that Van Doren should not have written that. As if to keep in mind the gravity of the mistake, he took to referring to his former teacher as “the happy man.”

Not long after, Van Doren’s son Charles became a TV celebrity, the star of a quiz show in which the young academic appeared to be an educated whiz, coming up with instant answers to every question asked. Eventually, Charles testified before Congress regarding the deception in which he’d participated. He’d been given the answers, letting himself be persuaded by the show’s directors that this was only show biz. But it had not been understood that way by the TV-watching public or the people’s representatives in Congress.

Van Doren accompanied his son to Washington and told the press afterward that this had been “the happiest day” of his life! He was referring to the truthfulness of his son’s compelled testimony under oath.

I remember my father’s head-shaking, choked murmur: “Mark! Mark!”

When my mother was a small child, she used to go around her parents’ home, exclaiming, “I’m so happy!” In the family, it got her permanently typed as The Dumb One.

Why did Solon and Aristotle, and my father, warn against the claim that one is “happy”? Is it wrong to think so? Or only wrong to say it out loud? And what exactly is wrong about it? For the Greeks, such assertions display hubris, pride, and thereby attract reprisals from the gods. Also, as Solon explained to Croesus, by treating good fortune as securely held in the king’s possession, he overlooked the fact that fortune (luck) is unstable by its nature.

Why did my father react the way he did to Van Doren’s claim to be a happy man? I don’t know. Sometimes, he foresaw things …

Here’s what I suspect about happiness. There might be a kind of joy that persists despite the mischances of life, and perhaps through them all. It’s not the same as being rich, powerful, young and good-looking. Rather, it may have to do with coming into congruence with oneself. We aren’t born sincere and unconcealed. It’s something we struggle for. One makes an effort to become who one says one is. There is a sense of clicking into congruence with oneself.

All the same, and beyond our control – the ancients were right. Our lives remain threaded through and through with networks of contingencies and dependencies. Given that bigger picture, the sense of inward joy seems to meet internal resistance, as if one were wary of tempting fate. We don’t know whether it’s safe to feel joy or admit in public that one has done so. We’re not quite sure how to calculate

the hazards of joy.

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