Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column

Is There Still Any “Woman Question”?

Posted on February 3, 2026 by Abigail

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.

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What’s Missing?

Posted on January 27, 2026 by Abigail

“The Death of Socrates”
Jacques- Louis David, 1787

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:

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.
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.
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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Persons Real and Unreal

Posted on January 20, 2026 by Abigail

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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Athens versus Jerusalem?

Posted on January 13, 2026 by Abigail

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.

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Who Was Jesus?

Posted on January 6, 2026 by Abigail

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 did Jesus think 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.

Related Content: Jesus | When the Stones Speak

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The Stroke of Lightning

Posted on December 30, 2025 by Abigail

Henry Holiday (1839–1927), *Sketch for “Dante and Beatrice”*, c. 1880.
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.

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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Book Matters

Posted on December 23, 2025 by Abigail

Israel, Jews And The World: An Opportunity for Repair and Redemption in the 21st Century

By Gina Ross

The above title is not quite a book, but is a little longer than a pamphlet. And this present column is not quite a book report either. More like my reflections on a pamphlet.

First, to set the scene, let me tell you about the dream I had last night. In my dream, I was arguing with an anti-semite. He was youngish, looked something like that Fuentes character, and endlessly voluble. Articulate. Never at a loss for words. And I wasn’t nearly so voluble as he was. All I had were … values. Good values. I didn’t want to say anything unless I had sufficient grounds for thinking it was true. But my values and my words seemed weightless. My replies seemed totally without heft in my dream face-off with this character who had got hold of something that worked for him and made him sound important.

*. *. *

Gina Ross, whose small book I’ve just finished reading, is a specialist in the healing of trauma. She has her own method for repairing trauma’s effects, has written books that approach the subject of trauma-healing from different angles, and has founded institutions in Israel and in the United States where her methods are applied. The back pages of the booklet or pamphlet give links to sites where one can get hold of her videos and other materials.

What interested me is that she has (in a way that seems plausible) identified the special character of the astonishing wave of hatred-for-the-victims that swept over the planet in the immediate aftermath of the atrocity-packed massacres of October 7th and 8th, 2023!

Here’s her thesis: the Nazi Holocaust that murdered six million Jews was not the start of this brand of hatred: because of its efficiency and scope, it only brought to a climax the ideologies of contempt and rationales for persecution that had been respectably endorsed and openly operative for almost two thousand years. Since most of the countries where Jews had lived had put up no effective resistance to the Nazi roundup – for the purpose of mass murder – of their fellow citizens, a certain degree of shame or moral uneasiness had officially settled over the topic of Jews. However, by and large, the needed moral self-review did not take place.

Instead, the feelings that had quietly acquiesced in the Holocaust were repressed in the decades following World War II. Repressed, and neither acknowledged nor worked through. So the bizarre, global outbreaks of gleeful atrocity-approval can be understood as cases of the Return of the Repressed (though Ross does not use that Freudian terminology).

That said, our present disheartening situation does offer another chance to revisit the collective bad conscience and, finally, to transcend the past. First, by acknowledging it and next by conscientiously refusing to repeat it. With this hopeful possibility in view, Ross offers eight steps to take, if the therapeutic potential of this moment is to be actualized.

Since the “steps” are not rote-like but explicated in accompanying discussions, I’ll try to summarize some of them to give an idea of the entire list of eight.

Jews who in Israel have acquired effective military skill in defending themselves, now need to acquire equivalent communicative skill in defending their right of self-defense.
Moderate Arab nations, having recognized their common interest with Israel in modernizing the Middle East, now need to be joined by forces in the West that recognize the common threat to civilization presented by radical Islam.
– 8. The West needs to face its long history of anti-semitism, regain the moral clarity that’s been missing with reference to its past, and shut down the menacing activities that target Jewish students and faculty on university grounds and other public places – activities not permitted against any other group. Liberation movements in Iran need to be supported, the ambivalence of Eastern Europe confronted and the support for Israel from 19 Latin American leaders foregrounded. Israel’s effective self-defense and unusual achievements as a nation are not a byproduct of European guilt but rather the expression of Judaism’s sacred vocation of unbroken chronological memory – beginning in Biblical times and going forward into the present and future. Israel lives in history. That’s what it does. That’s why we have a Bible.

At first, I read her eight steps with impatience at what looked to me like a utopian fantasy. But finally I decided that she’s unlikely to be putting forth these eight steps out of naivete. Her Sephardic family was forced out of two Middle Eastern countries. She’s watched the gradual buildup of anti-semitism in our country, and other Western countries, without surprise or denial. She’s not a fool.

What is she doing, really? She’s identifying a collective displacement without taking instant recourse to empty generalities. She’s giving it the relevant name or category:

Antisemitism,

repressed and never faced.

She’s resisting collective delusions, such as the ones that blame the victims or propose abstract remedies that predictably lead to future victims. She’s looking at the constructive forces in the situation and placing her hopes where they have some chance of being realized.

As someone who is still in some degree traumatized by the events of October 7th & 8th, 2023, I’ve tried out one of her healing techniques. I didn’t do it for as long or as carefully as she recommends. I didn’t give it much time. But it did seem to do me some good.

Now we need –

to get the rest of the world

to try to face

what it has repressed.

Posted in book reviews, books | Tagged book matters, Gina Ross’ A Call To Action For Israel Jews and the World: An Opportunity for Repair and Redemption | 2 Comments

The Chosen People

Posted on December 16, 2025 by Abigail

I don’t remember what I’d been intending to write about today. Perhaps no topic had as yet occurred to me. Earlier this afternoon I’d been talking to an Israeli cousin – about life and love and family lore – and savoring a felt closeness, though we hadn’t seen each other for years.

Then, I got off the phone, and looked reflexively at the news. It was Sunday. There was the massacre of the Jewish Chanuka celebrants at Bondi Beach, which is the beach near the city of Sydney in Australia.

As it happens, I’d spent meaningful professional time at one of the philosophy departments of Sydney University. Although once or twice there’d been glancing incidents of a prejudicial type – to me these had the character of trailing streamers from the old country (England) and stopped well short of concerted bigotry.

Just offhand, this feels to me as if the “anti-Zionist” cover story (if that ever served as a credible cover) has broken down and the admitted target is now Jews. Quite simply. Quite openly.

In consequence:

1. it’s hard for Jews to gather if they’re going to be picked off at a gathering;

2. it’s hard for Jews to fight this thing alone.

Since I don’t have Big Answers to these interesting strategic questions, it might be illuminating provisionally just to review my own relation to my identity insofar as it is specifically Jewish. I realize that murderous anti-semites don’t care what kind of a Jew one is – but I do care.

First of all, I am the granddaughter of a rabbi who has two streets named after him (Rehov Rav Tzair) in Israel, who’d walked through bullets to stop a pogrom, who held a German doctorate in Judaica, and looked a lot like God in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. I was his favorite grandchild. We loved each other. He rooted my life in this ancient lineage, although he was a modernizer and a Zionist.

My father had been a rabbi in his younger years, though the profession did not suit him and he later became a professor of philosophy. He and my mother brought over ten families whom they did not know, rescuing them from the Holocaust, while rescue was still possible.

During the War, my mother uncovered a Nazi spy ring in the basement of the building where we lived, in Manhattan’s Yorkville. The building’s superintendent had a shortwave radio and related equipment in the basement, which probably kept him in contact with enemy ships off the New York shore. It seems likely that he was part of the Duquesne Spy Ring that was rounded up on June 28, 1941. Alerted by my mother, the FBI added a raid on our building and hustled him off to … what I always think of as “volleyball camp” … where he remained at least until the War in Europe was won. My mother saw him in the neighborhood after the Allied Victory and reported that he gave her “a very sour look.”

Those, so far as I now recall, were the broad lines of immediate connection to my Jewish inheritance, though the spaces between the broad lines were quite interestingly filled in too.

On my mother’s side, I have family whose connections and influence at one time might have provided a partial map of Israel’s political interrelations. Or so an Israeli colleague – who hadn’t known that all these people were related – told me.

One instance: during the year when I was in Paris on a Fulbright, my mother’s cousin was the Israeli ambassador to France.

These relations, though dear to me, I gave up as the price of defending a young Israeli cousin whose parents had wronged her quite consequentially. I did it for the sake of her parents whom I loved, as much as for her, but I knew it would cost me the entire Israel connection. An irreparable loss.

* * *

Meanwhile, I had not been raised in the surround of Jewish observance or synagogue affiliation. So my Jewish aspect – which ran deep but along idiosyncratic lines – remained “Jewish in the head.” As one ritually observant Jewish friend told me, I had “the Jewish essence but not Jewish existence.”

So what is it, the Jewish essence, now that the wolves are back on the prowl for Jewish existence? What is it that I have – besides a target on my back?

It’s the great privilege of being in the ever-renewed and ever-renewable paradigmatic relation to God in history.

I wouldn’t change that for the world.

Related Content: Tales of Rav Tsair | Tales of My Mother

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Does Life Have Meaning?

Posted on December 9, 2025 by Abigail

Books by Viktor Frankl had been lying around the house for years, but I had never opened one. Their titles in translation (e.g. Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything) – seeming to capture banality pure, unalloyed and fully platitudinous – did not attract me.

One time I had in fact been advised, by a well-intentioned therapist, to “say yes to life.” The advice came at a time when all the vectors that to me carried meaning were colliding and cancelling each other out. What vectors – what motivations – were those? The study of philosophy, the preservation of femininity, and the then-prevailing concept of women as essentially dependent on and secondary to men. As a result, there was nothing in my life that I could say yes to – without at the same time and in the same respect saying “no.”

So I associated Frankl with the kind of advice-giving that would be upbeat but shallow and of no earthly use to a person in despair.

That being the background, it was a great surprise to me when recently I happened to pick up a book by Viktor Frankl and found it dense with insights! His views, derived from professional psychiatric practice, predated the Second World War but got toughened and honed by his experience as a Jewish prisoner in a Nazi death camp. Contrary to the more well-known views of Hannah Arendt in her Origins of Totalitarianism prisoners – in the deepest hell that had yet been devised in human history – were not inwardly dehumanized. Nor were they rendered incapable of moral choice.

Right after the War, Frankl described the effect on his fellow prisoners of being deliberately dehumanized. These were the people who hadn’t been selected for immediate murder but instead deemed well enough to be worked to death on meagre rations, while guarded on all sides by Nazis of terrifying brutality. This life, under a dark sky, with no end foreseeable, tested the sufferers. Pushed to limits none could have imagined, some rose to inner heights; others despaired and collapsed utterly.

Frankl emerged from his own trial-by-fire clearly ennobled and determined to do good. Being trained in psychiatry, he remained in his native Vienna and devised a novel type of psychotherapy which he called logotherapy. It differed from the Freudian therapy, then still dominant, which he deemed incomplete since its delvings into the unconscious retrieved only those repressed drives found at the most primitive psychic levels. As to the rival Jungian therapy, with its collective unconscious: that seemed to Frankl to take in higher levels but also to rest on a mistake. Jung was wrong to hold that the contents of a person’s unconscious are collective – shared by the generality of humankind. The truth is subtler than that. It’s rather that, in each man or woman, the contents of his or her unconscious are unique.

In addition to instinctual drives and emotional contents, there is one further level to the psyche: the spiritual unconscious. In each of us, this would be a part of the psyche that cannot be mapped because it’s the source of all the mappings of our lives, that we devise and draw, for all our complex purposes.

What specific work does the spiritual unconscious do? It tells us what, on the highest level, we are called to do in our lives.

Here is Frankl, in Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning, writing on the topic of “conscience.” What is conscience for him? Not the recourse to a general rule as certain recent philosophers – like Kant (with his universalizability), or the Utilitarians (with their greatest happiness for the greatest number) – would have it. Not even the Ten Commandments suffice to tell each of us, personally, what must be done or not done in the unique case that we confront.

“Only conscience is capable of adjusting the ‘eternal,’ generally agreed-upon moral law to the specific situation in which a concrete person is engaged. Living one’s conscience always means living on a highly personalized level, aware of the full concreteness of each situation.”

I recall describing to Hannah Arendt the precise circumstances that led to my firing and subsequent seven-year fight (ultimately successful) to be reinstated in the Philosophy Department of the college where I taught.

Here’s what I told her: The senior professor who had just observed my teaching hour – and had yet to write the Teaching Observation Report that would decide my professional fate – had just asked me why I thought he was supporting a candidate for Department chairman whom I believed unqualified for that leadership position.

This gave me a consequential choice between two paths: the first path, to tactfully evade the senior professor’s question or the second path, to reply candidly.

I replied candidly:

I believe you back him

because he’s weak –

and you think you can use him.

When I retold that story to Arendt, instantly she reproached my impolitic and gratuitous tactlessness!

But no. Precisely in that consequential context, tactful dodging, harmless in other contexts, would have been – for me then and there – dishonest and cowardly.

To teach philosophy is both a privilege and a job. But in this case the two were in conflict. Teaching philosophy required truth-telling. And truth-telling would cost me my job.

I would say that I “knew it.” But how did I know it? The way one knows such things.

It was the price of remaining myself.

Related Content: The Puzzle of Hannah Arendt

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The Photographic Negative of the Zeitgeist

Posted on December 2, 2025 by Abigail

On the night of Passover, during the dinner celebrated in commemoration of the Exodus from Egypt, a cup of wine is set on the table for Elijah – the herald of the messianic age – to drink when he stops in to join the gathering. The door is left unlocked.

If you ask me, it’s about time he showed up. Here’s evidence. A familiar feature of nondenominational meetings of theologians that I’ve attended – here the most recent one looked to be just a bit of an exception – is the absence of Jews and Judaism from discussions of world religions! Jews seem to be “present” mainly in the form of absence – as the empty chair at the table. I have no way of knowing how typical this is. Here I only report what I have noticed.

It’s pretty odd, when you come to think of it. Theologians who would rather be crucified-near-an-anthill than disparage any heretofore marginalized group show no qualm at leaving unmentioned the one group known to have suffered nearly two thousand years of calumny, which culminated in what may be the greatest single crime against humanity in recorded history: the Holocaust.

Calumny? False accusations? What calumnies? Thank you for asking. I’ll be happy to list them. Whatever the spirit of the age – Jews are projected as its antithesis. Like a photo negative of the Zeitgeist.

1. In the Christian era, God was universally held to have taken on human form (incarnated) as Jesus, the Jewish carpenter from Nazareth. He attracted a significant popular following as the messiah at a time when that title was associated with an anticipated figure who would overthrow Roman rule in Roman-occupied Judea. The four records we have of the life of Jesus have the Jewish authorities fearing Roman reprisal and turning him over to Roman authorities for crucifixion, a method that had already blackened the Judean hills with crosses.

1a. The calumny: all Jews, morning, noon and night, crucify Jesus.

Crazy, no?

2. Enlightened Europeans, emerging from the combats between Christian denominations that had wracked Europe, welcomed the triumph of Newtonian Laws of Nature presided over by an impartial, universal Providence.

2a. The calumny: Jews are merely particularistic, without concern for the universal – only for other Jews. Suggestion:

Give Jews the same opportunities,

and see how they do,

on charity, shared social concerns,

and universal human rights.

3. Romanticism privileges passionate intensity, reacts against Enlightenment rationalism, and stresses native lands and native spirit.

3a. The calumny: Jews are rootless, homeless cosmopolitans, never at home, always wandering.

Jews don’t “wander.”

They are forced out!

Once again – whatever the currently accepted worldview is – Jews are imagined as its antithesis.

4. Darwinian principles view all of life, including human life, as a struggle for survival, where only the fittest prevail.

4a. The Nazi calumny: Jews are a “race” unlike any other, in that it’s the only toxic race.

Jews are a people, not a race.

They are not defined biologically but covenantally.

One can join this people and then be understood

to have stood with them at Mt Sinai and

with them accepted their covenant with God.

5. Post-colonialism: Each people has its own traditions – to be respected on its own terms – without subordinating its way of seeing, saying and being to any purported “universalism” that actually masks Western hegemony.

5a. The calumny: The nation of Israel is regarded as a colonial imposition even though it’s the ancient homeland of the Jews. It’s accorded no right to exist, much less prevail in battle against enemies unashamedly determined to destroy it utterly, from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean sea.

When I first saw the Land of Israel

looking down from the El Al plane

circling for a landing –

what came to mind unbidden was –

‘There it is again. How nice!

They’ve put cities down this time.’

*. *. *

In the Hebrew Bible, the human story begins with a fratricide. One brother fears that the other brother has the inside track with God. So Cain kills Abel in the somewhat doltish belief that God will then transfer the divine affection to Cain. Why? Because God will then have no alternative.

However, Cain’s calculation fails. It seems God is not so easily fooled.

Here’s an idea! How about people, inclined to blame Jews alone – uniquely and repetitively from age to age – try this alternative: thanking the Jews for making the Creator better known to humankind! The Jews did this by conscientiously keeping the historical record of their own relationship with God – even when it did not flatter them!

Just a simple “thanks” would do.

By contrast, here are some real people:

Israel, Jews And The World: An Opportunity for Repair and Redemption in the 21st Century

By Gina Ross

Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column

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