I Dreamed I Saw Hitler Last Night

Posted on November 28, 2023 by Abigail
I Dreamed I Saw

Abbie on horseback

Make no mistake, in my whole life Hitler has never appeared in any dream or daydream of mine. I don’t think about Hitler. He’s not in the iconography of my consciousness.

This was also the first time I’d seen him in living color, as opposed to World War II newsreel footage, which shows him in black and white. Footage of that era would not have been able to show how, in his dream appearance, Hitler’s uniform was adorned with a red cummerbund around the waist. That color was the main thing I noticed. His face was obscure.

Since I was on horseback in the dream, I quickened my pace to a trot, hoping to get past his ground-level reviewing stand before he noticed me. Unfortunately, my plan didn’t succeed and he called me over. He turned out to be in an affable mood, however. After we’d exchanged a few pleasantries, I found an excuse to trot on.

What brought on this dream? I imagine it could have been precipitated by an incident at a theology conference that Jerry and I attended just before Thanksgiving. One speaker at the conference happened to misdescribe the Judaism of the earliest days of Christianity as ethno-nationalist and closed to converts. Although I wasn’t at all keen to get into any of that, my Inner Prompt was unmistakable. So I raised my hand to point out that conversion was certainly accepted in first-century Judaism, although not a prerequisite for spiritual advancement, since the Righteous Gentile is an acknowledged figure in rabbinic discussion and is [by some discussants] admitted to have a spiritual status at the highest level. I contrasted this liberality with the illiberal positions, in equivalent cases concerning Jews, taken by fourth century Christian saints like Ambrose and Augustine.

Up to that point, I did not think that anything unusual had happened. An educated speaker had made a point, and his point had been disputed at the Q and A by an educated listener in the audience. It was only when I noticed no one in the audience looking my way – and saw everyone looking the other way – that it first occurred to me that, in current academic discourse, the point I had made might have been radioactive. That night, I dreamed the dream already described.

However, in the waning daylight of that afternoon, I wasn’t looking at metaphors. There was a situation to be handled. With Jerry, I joined an all-male group of theologians who were analyzing some interesting issues unrelated to the episode just described. In what felt like a throwback to pre-feminist days, none of the men were even looking at me. This was unusual but, intuitively, I refrained from elbowing my way into the group conversation, in which I had little to contribute anyway. I just waited. At last, late in the discussion, I saw a way to say something that would not be considered threatening. I quoted something my mother had said when she was dying. It was mild and feminine. After that, the men could see that I wasn’t mad at them and, with body language, allowed a bit more space for my presence at the table. By the next day, no one was looking away or looking at me in a funny way. 

Situation handled.

What happened? What lesson do I draw from this? On the one hand, my dream showed that I well understood the incident’s threatening possibilities. On the other hand, the success of my coping strategy showed that another reality was also present and in play.

If I forgave them enough

to stay in the game,

they could forgive me and themselves –

enough to stay with me in the game.

Related Content: Podcast: The Life Wisdom Project | Shared Journeys: Marriage and Divine Encounters | Special Guest: Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal | Column: The Politics of Ideas

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Book Matters

Posted on November 21, 2023 by Abigail

Simon Wiesenthal

“Young Girl Reading” Seymour Joseph Guy, 1877

The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness

By Simon Wiesenthal

Last week, we shared a few of the invited comments on an incident recollected in Wiesenthal’s memoir. Wiesenthal is a prisoner in a succession of concentration camps. He is called to the hospital to witness a dying SS man’s regret. The man’s remorse had this particular focus: he’d participated in forcing a large group of Jews of all ages and conditions into a building that his SS unit then set on fire. Rather than pronounce some formula of absolution, Wiesenthal had listened to the confession in silence and left in silence.

In The Sunflower, about his concentration camp experience, Wiesenthal asked ten thoughtful individuals to comment on the incident. Since the comments (with an additional thirty-two in this edition) were revealing, I shared some last week and will now share a few others.

Here is Erich H. Loewy, M.D., author and Alumni Chair of Bioethics at the University of California at Davis. He points out a feature I hadn’t noticed. Although the positions of the two men appear reversed, with Wiesenthal now the stronger one and the SS man about to lose his life, the reality is still that “at any moment the SS man, although in one sense weakened, can call upon overwhelming forces which could and would crush Wiesenthal.”

What this means is that anything the Jewish prisoner says can still be held against him. Let’s face it. Death might free us from the burdens of human existence but life in a death camp does not. A man whose body fails him while his conscience torments him is not someone to rely on. 

But wait a minute! Don’t we want closure – at least in our ex post facto understanding? Isn’t that asymmetry morally unsatisfying? 

Yes. 

Manes Sperber studied psychology in Vienna with Alfred Adler and wrote literary works in French and German. He brings up another facet of the situation: there is, he says, a bond between victimizer and victim. What sort of bond does he have in mind? Clearly they are linked historically. They would be linked in any courtroom case. But Sperber seems to visualize a psychological link. And here is how he imagines it playing out ideally: “But if that young man had lived and remained true to the convictions that tortured the last hours of his life, and maybe even transfigured him—if he were still among us would Wiesenthal condemn him? I think not.”

Sperber’s counterfactuals may be useful in the setting of a psychotherapist’s office. However, they are not morally useful. The terms for that kind of assessment were set in the context of what wasn’t done and didn’t happen.

What about the psychological aspects, as Sperber sees them? For myself, I don’t see it the way he does. There are people who harmed me, with whom I feel no bond and whom I never think of. Why is that? Because the harm was identified in full and fully thwarted. My present unconcern with those harm doers obtains even if their harm lasted many years and its antidote took effect much more briefly. So far as I am concerned, that situation is cured. By contrast, harms still uncured continue to trouble me, even if their effect was more trivial and briefer. 

So, if I consult my own experience, I must reject Sperber’s effort to replace the moral order with psychology. A moral harm can’t be erased that way.

Eva Fleischner is an author, a Professor Emerita of Religion and is involved in high-level offices dealing with Catholic-Jewish relations. She notes details of Wiesenthal’s behavior with the dying man that reveal compassion and refinement of spirit. She also notes that both traditions, Catholic and Jewish, highlight God’s forgiveness of the truly repentant sinner. What she brings out, overlooked by some Christian commenters, is that Jesus’ call to turn the other cheek refers to “wrong done to me… . Nowhere does he tell us to forgive wrong done to another.”

In the circumstance where Wiesenthal was implicitly asked to do just that, to forgive wrong done to many others, he could not in conscience have done so, and – in the light of his ongoing suffering and peril – the dying SS man was humanly oblivious to ask it of him.

If Eva Fleischner is right about the scope of Christian forgiveness, then the two faiths are not so different after all.

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Book Matters

Posted on November 14, 2023 by Abigail

Limits of Forgiveness

“Young Girl Reading” Seymour Joseph Guy, 1877

The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness

By Simon Wiesenthal

The author was a young Jewish prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp, in conditions of near starvation, slated for death by heavy labor. Other, mostly Jewish prisoners had been separated from the work details at the outset and immediately murdered.

One day, an unusual incident interrupted the ghastly routine. A nurse appeared, ordering Wiesenthal out of the line of workers and leading him to the bedside of a dying SS man. The dying man wanted to confess to a Jew one atrocity that weighed on his conscience. His unit had forced a large number of Jews, young and old, into a building to which the SS then set fire, killing them all. Among those who perished, he especially remembered a father and his very young son.

If the dying man expected Wiesenthal to express forgiveness, his wish must have been frustrated. Our author heard him out reluctantly, kept silent and left the room as soon as the man finished his confession. Once back in the camp, Wiesenthal shared the same scene with his emaciated, doomed friends. When, having by chance survived the war, he wrote this memoir, he invited thoughtful comments from ten contributors. 

In my previous week’s column, “The Color of the Sky,” I volunteered my own comments on the deathbed confession scene. Now, I’ll share some of the invited comments reproduced in the 1997 Schocken edition. In all, the book has 42 comments, 10 from the 1969 (in English 1970) original edition and 32 from this expanded second edition. Since most of the assembled comments are of the greatest interest, the three I describe here have been picked out nearly at random. 

First, we hear from Primo Levi, a notable writer and Auschwitz survivor. Wiesenthal’s tale unfolded, Levi comments, “in an atmosphere impregnated with crime.” All questions of right and wrong were obscured in the concentration camp, deeply and deliberately. In that context above all, Levi is emphatic in his conviction that Wiesenthal did right to refrain from bestowing any verbal absolution. It would have given the illusion of salvation to the dying SS man but burdened Wiesenthal with “an empty formula and consequently a lie.” Like other Jewish contributors, Primo Levi doesn’t miss the fact that Wiesenthal is being used to stand in for all Jews, thus replicating in another guise the Jew of Nazi propaganda: “an abnormal being – half-devil, half-miracle worker, capable in any case of supernatural deeds.” For Levi, what’s at risk in this deathbed test is truth. As he sees it, Wiesenthal has passed the test.

Next we hear from Cynthia Ozick, award-wining novelist, essayist and writer of short stories. Her central point concerns pity. Here I quote it in full. “Every idol is a shadow of [Biblical idol] Moloch, demanding human flesh to feed on. The deeper the devotion to the idol, the more pitiless in tossing it its meal will be the devotee. The Commandment against idols is above all a Commandment against victimization, and in behalf of pity.” The quick forgiver, in haste to wash the murderer clean, has washed away the victim. By contrast, the person who steadily seeks the Law’s just retribution keeps the victims constantly in view and gives them back their forgotten faces. Some might reproach Cynthia Ozick for her refusal to accept a dying murderer’s remorse, but to me she seems rather tender.

Our last comment comes from award-winning writer Harry Wu, a witness of an entirely different kind. Wu spent nineteen years in one of China’s prison labor camps, sent there for “rightist tendencies.” In plain words, he committed the crime of voicing his personal opinion in the midst of a group indoctrination session. What stands out in Hu’s account of brutal imprisonment is that no one who enforced that punishment ever took the slightest personal responsibility for it. Not even later, after his condemnation had been retroactively lifted! The Party Line giveth and the Party Line taketh away.

So we learn that there’s one thing even worse – more erasing of the human face – than evil. 

Even worse

is pretending that 

evil does not exist.

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The Color of the Sky

Posted on November 7, 2023 by Abigail
The Color of the Sky
Landscape with a Lake.
Jeanne-Baptiste Corot ca. 1860’s-1870’s.

We were in California this past week where from time to time Jerry and I go for neuropathy treatments for me that actually help. Since October 7, the color of the sky has changed for me, so I was glad to get away. On our last day, we stopped at a bookstore in Riverside for airplane reading. I picked out a paperback titled The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness. It was written by Simon Wiesenthal and is a well-known memoir of his time as a Jewish youth imprisoned in a succession of Nazi concentration camps. Those were places housing large numbers of people – mostly Jews – who were selected for getting murdered at once or else kept alive for being worked to death by starvation, exhaustion and uncontained brutality.

Wiesenthal’s memoir includes a key story that’s been discussed in seminaries and educational institutions here and abroad. The first English language edition (1970, Schocken Books) included ten essays commenting on the episode. The present revised edition (Schocken, 1997) adds 32 new essays reflecting on the incident, contributed by eminent writers, journalists, political and religious leaders.

As reported in the Preface by co-editor Bonny Fetterman, “Wiesenthal’s Dokumentationszentrum, which seeks out Nazi criminals, has helped to bring over 1,100 Nazis to justice since the end of the [second world] war.” 

Known as a world-wide Nazi hunter, Wiesenthal was the Man Who Never Forgot – a single-minded angel of retribution. For some, the more tender-minded souls perhaps, he may have been seen as the man who could not “get over it” – who could not, as they say, “get a life!”

So it was with astonishment that I now read his memoir for the first time. It was exceptionally well written! He portrayed the death camp experience with more incisive, telling strokes than I’d ever seen that done and invested the widely discussed key episode with immense moral freshness. It’s my guess that, had he chosen to live out his literary talent, Simon Wiesenthal could have been recognized as one of his century’s major writers. So the vocation he followed was not chosen for want of other options.

What is the key episode in the memoir, the one revisited by so many people of consequence in our present world? The young Wiesenthal had been part of a group of starving forced laborers, marched out for another day of being worked to death, when a nurse broke into the line and, without explanation, summoned him to follow her. She led him into a medical facility, then to the bedside of a young German he did not know, who was wrapped in face-concealing bandages and clearly dying.

The dying man had been, as he managed to explain to Wiesenthal, in the SS. Those initials are short for Schutzstaffel, Hitler’s elite military and intelligence cadre, which was charged with war crimes at the postwar Nuremberg Tribunal.

The dying SS man wanted to express, to “a Jew,” the deep remorse he felt, first at having allowed himself to be drawn into the SS, and particularly at having participated in the herding of hundreds of Jews of every age and condition into a building far too small to hold them, which he and others then set on fire, killing all who’d been forced into the building. 

Wiesenthal – who’d been summoned seemingly to stand in for the Jewish People – kept silent during the man’s confession, left as soon as he could, and afterward refused to accept a parcel that the now-deceased SS man had bequeathed him. He told the messenger to send it instead to the mother of the deceased. Nevertheless – and perhaps because of the perceived sincerity of the dying man’s remorse – Wiesenthal felt gripped by the episode, revisiting it in this memoir where he invited others to comment.

Although I wasn’t in the number of those invited, anyone who reads the story will sense the same summons. So okay, what do I think? What would I say to this dying SS man? Well, to begin with, I would look at his bandaged face with great curiosity, wishing I could see more. At least I would like to see his eyes – said to be the window of the soul. For I know he was a rare fellow, not your typical SS veteran. 

I met an ex-SS man one time, when I and a woman friend were on our way via auto stop (hitchhiking) to Vienna. The driver who picked us up answered a question from me about post-war attitudes by explaining that Hitler had been very good for the youth. I demurred, saying something about Anne Frank, who’d been quite young herself. 

“Oh,” he responded, “Yes, yes. I know all about Anne Frank. It’s much exaggerated. You know,” he continued, “nowadays they say terrible things about SS. I was in SS. All my friends were in SS! We were all picked men. Not a one of us under six feet!”

So I learned that a contrite SS man is no common find. But what else, besides SS, had this young man been, who was now on his death bed? What would I have said to him? What was there to say? Let’s give it a go.

“I wish I could welcome you back into the human community. But, to meet Jewish requirements, you must carry through your repentance by mending the damage done, as far as possible. Unfortunately, in the case of murder, it’s not possible. Even if, for the sake of argument, we suppose reincarnation – that we go on to live many more lives – you’d still have to go to each victim, make clear that you fully understood and were most sorry for the harm you did, and (if found credible) ask each victim to show you how you might best repair the damage. Then, insofar as repair proved feasible, the victim would be obligated to forgive you.” 

But how could repair be feasible? It would have to extend to all who were harmed – physically, morally or psychologically – by the harm inflicted on just one victim. 

 Not one of us is only one.

“So repair is not feasible. What you did is irreparable. Let that be a lesson to you!”

But why this suffering? Why does God permit it? Or is the Shekinah – the Divine Presence – simply, as one of Wiesenthal’s fellow prisoners opined, “on a leave of absence”?

So far as I can figure, any suffering inflicted out of intentional cruelty has at least this much significance: if it had no victims, such cruelty might seem idle, harmless – a mere game. So, partly by the suffering of such victims, the map of permissible acts gets its defining limits. On account of the suffering caused by evil, the human world acquires moral intelligibility. Therefore ours continues to be a recognizable world. It doesn’t sink back into the chaos that obtained before creation.

But the cost to the victim is truly heavy.

No normal person

could want to pay it.

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Book Matters

Posted on October 31, 2023 by Abigail

Dara Horn

“Young Girl Reading” Seymour Joseph Guy, 1877

Abbie is away this week getting treatments in California. This review was posted on October 19, 2021, but continues to be timely.

People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

By Dara Horn

The only other book by Dara Horn that I’ve read is Eternal Life, which is a kind of romantic fiction with a difference. In that book, the girl and boy first meet in the period of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, where he is a member of the priestly class. In the tradition of all bodice busters, they fall deeply and irrevocably in love, but there’s an unusual glitch.

They can’t die.

They survive, century after century, into the present era. Meanwhile, in each generation, their children are born, grow old and predecease them. It’s a kind of curse, and I forget how it ends (sorry!) but, be assured, it’s haunting.

Aside from that, I see occasional articles by Dara Horn in the Jewish Review of Books. Four other books of hers are cited inside the cover. She’s taught Jewish literature at top universities and is a scholar of Jewish history. In short, she’s a talent, a fresh voice, and a presence on the cultural scene.

Ordinarily, such early and deserved success has its price. An acclaimed writer can feel reluctant to jeopardize her perch near the top of the prestige ladder. However, in the case of People Love Dead Jews, we can stop worrying. Dara Horn has not sold out.

Her title makes clear her thesis: the wide public acknowledgment of the Holocaust as outstandingly horrible tends to mask (or compensate in advance) for a contempt and erasure of Jews that continues — briskly and dangerously — for Jews living now.

Some of her examples were news to me. Take Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam. The Secret Annex, where (till they were betrayed) the Frank family hid from the Nazis, draws more than a million visitors a year. Anne’s Diary has been translated into seventy languages and has sold upwards of 30 million copies. Nevertheless, a young employee at the Ann Frank House was forbidden to wear his kippah on the ground that it might compromise the museum’s “independent position.” Hmm. Of what was the museum displaying independence?

Throughout Europe, there are Heritage Sites to which Dara Horn travels. These sites show and even reconstruct places where — before the Holocaust — real Jews once lived and worshipped. Coupled with displays of local pride at a Jewish heritage that draws touristic visitors, discreet silence reigns as to why no Jews live there now.

Take the town of Harbin in Manchuria (Northeastern China). About a million people live there at present. In 1896, it contained only a few small fishing villages scattered round the bend of a river. In that year, China ceded the locale to Tsarist Russia, a concession that allowed construction work to continue on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. To build that section of the railroad, Russia needed skilled people who would migrate to Harbin because, for them, living in Siberia would be an improvement!

Ah-hah, the Jews! Promised freedom from antisemitic laws, they flocked to Harbin! They built schools, theaters, orchestras, synagogues, ritual baths, bakeries, kosher facilities and so on. And the railroad of course. The Jewish population grew to about 20,000. At which point — between White Russians fleeing the Russian Revolution, Japanese occupation forces throughout the Nazi years, and finally Soviet Russians returning to Siberia after the War — the entire Jewish population was either forced out or murdered. I omit details. Dara Horn found one Jew alive in Harbin. That town is now a Heritage Site.

I’d known nothing of this story, but learning it now struck me with peculiar force. In the Preamble of my new ‘Dear Abbie” podcasts, I describe three women who – in my childhood — exemplified the art of being a fully grownup woman. One was a Russian woman who, as now I recollect, had been born — in Harbin! As a schoolchild, she recalled time being set aside for the class to pray for Alexei, the hemophiliac son of Tsar Nicholas II. My mother’s woman friend returned to Russia on a touristic visit after the fall of communism. She had no thought of Harbin, but in Moscow she did go into a synagogue, one of those recently reopened. Perceiving a Jewish woman who spoke Russian natively, Jews crowded round her to tell her what they had lived through. From them, she learned what she would have faced had she not emigrated to America as a young woman. When she returned to her hotel that night, she cried for many hours.

In other places, it’s worse: there are not even heritage sites. For example, there are none in the Middle East and North Africa, where Jews lived for millennia before they were driven out or killed, their synagogues burned, their neighborhoods reduced to rubble, and commemorations of vanished communities prohibited.

Nevertheless, as Dara Horn has discovered, there is “a virtual museum called Diarna, a Judeo-Arabic word meaning ‘our homes.’ The flagship project of the nonprofit group Digital Heritage Mapping, Diarna is a vast online resource that combines traditional and high tech photography, satellite imaging, digital mapping, 3-D modeling, archival materials and oral histories to allow anyone to virtually ‘visit’ Jewish historical sites … .”

The recovery of these data has called into being — from different individuals who get no profit from their efforts — spontaneous courage and tireless ingenuity. This kind of zeal for memory must be borne aloft on a counter-entropic energy of its own — like a waterfall that insists on flowing uphill.

There are other stories, American stories – too many to tell here.

Dara Horn seems herself like Diarna: a counter-entropic cascade of insightful outrage that – against the probabilities – flows tirelessly uphill!

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The Romance of Life

Posted on October 17, 2023 by Abigail

The Romance of Life

Mount Herzl Military Cemetery – National Memorial Hall. Photo by Dr. Avishai Teicher.

There are people who suppose, whenever they learn of an act of unbelievable cruelty, that it must have been done in reaction to some unseen but equally towering grievance. To such people, the forces in the human situation are taken to illustrate Newton’s Third Law of Motion whereby any action prompts an equal and opposite reaction. 

Transposed into the language of human values, where we are no longer talking about neutral motions and counter-motions, but about acts motivated by hatred, the Third Law as metaphor would seem to offer a justification for any and all repugnant acts. The worse the outrage perpetrated, the more the metaphor of equal and opposite reaction is invoked: the victim must have done something at least as cruel to prompt it. 

If I myself try, empathically, to think that way, about some real instance of cruelty, an immediate flow of compassion wells up in me – for the perpetrators!

Against this physicalist metaphor, there is a rabbinic saying that describes the same phenomenon without pulling Newton’s Third Law into the realm of human affairs. Here’s how that saying goes:

Whoever is kind to the cruel

will be cruel to the kind.

These reflections put me in mind of an occurrence I wrote about a few years ago in these columns. I’d been having lunch in a restaurant I frequented and also writing in my notebook. The place was empty, save for me and a woman seated some tables away. The woman was exuberantly sharing views with the restaurant owner. Views in the genre of, let us say, country club antisemitism.

Catching the drift, from time to time I would give the woman an outraged look. Our gazes would meet. I can’t be sure how Jewish she took me to be – as opposed to generic Mediterranean – but I suspect that a customer who was writing while having lunch, might be taken to be Jewish!

I won’t go into what I did next but, in the end, the country club lady was tearfully asking me to forgive her. 

However, I did not produce the “I forgive you” happy ending. In the Jewish practice of atonement, some evidence of an inner change is required for forgiveness to be meaningful. What would count as minimal evidence? Well, for a start, she would need to make clear that she understood what she had done – what act called for forgiveness. From the way she simultaneously apologized and explained-away her previous remarks, it seemed to me that what she was mainly sorry for was her social miscalculation.

A friend to whom I told the story afterward commended me for eschewing the expected denouement. 

I woulda hugged her,

my friend admitted ruefully.

So don’t hug ‘em. We owe at least that much truth to our fellow mortals in the vale of tears we share.

***

Some lives show recurrent themes. I don’t know why but, again and again in my own life, I’ve had to deal with deliberate, precisely targeted and prolonged malevolence! My mother, who loved me, had her own explanation, but as she’s no longer here, we can leave her soothing words out of account. However, among the data that would support my mother’s view: I’ve kept good friends over a lifetime; I prefer and enjoy fun and harmony in groups and between persons; I’m not frustrated in my work; I love the man I married; I don’t lose every combat but from time to time have even won a few. And finally, a dialectical conversation, where participants earnestly and unpretentiously seek the truth about the topic they’re discussing, is close to my idea of heaven.

Nevertheless, I’ve had plural direct confrontations with malevolence. Often, it could have been quickly contained and dispatched if bystanders hadn’t reflexively spun it as a compensatory reaction to some conjectured grievance – an hypothesis that conveniently recast the resistant victim as the real culprit. Thus, misdirected compassion helps aggressors, who never fail to portray themselves as the true victims.

I’m not complaining. To fight the good fight is a fascinating (though also quite painful, injurious and scary) feature of the romance of life!

But how shall we deal with the strategy of Denial-and-Displacement I’ve been sketching here? There are all kinds of persuasive counter-arguments. My book, A Good Look at Evil, musters an array of contexts that can help us to see what’s going on. 

At present, however, I would prefer to approach the Strategist of Denial with a different question:

If instead of what you now do

you were to be merciless to the merciless –

and kind to the kind –

what would that cost you,

inwardly?

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Why Choose the Jews?

Posted on October 10, 2023 by Abigail
why choose the Jews

Cain and Abel: Orvieto Cathedral ca. 1310-31

It feels like forever – so changed are the times! – but it’s only been two days at this writing. Starting in the early hours of October 7, Hamas operatives surprised and overwhelmed Israeli surveillance and defenses at the Gaza border. As never before, they poured into the Jewish homeland itself to gun down, rape, mutilate and kidnap civilians. Not since Israel’s 1948 War of Independence has any attack come so close to the arteries and lifeblood of the whole country. 

I may or may not have Israeli cousins there under siege. They’d planned to return home to Israel for the fall months, to renew ties of friendship with their academic colleagues. I don’t know. I haven’t been able to reach them.

In a tiny country like Israel, there isn’t a front and a rear. Everyone is affected. It is, as Jimmy Baldwin described it long ago, a “frail handkerchief flung at the gateway of the middle east.”

When I first saw the land, looking down from my El Al flight, the words that came into my mind unbidden were these:

There it is again.

How nice!

They’ve put cities down this time!

Regimes change. Cultural styles change. Human experience comes in new forms, suited to each new era. Only this hatred does not change. Inside its current bottle of “anti-zionism,” the very same grotesque caricatures have been mixed, for swallowing all the way down to the last, toxic dregs. Quite as if we’d never seen this stuff before.

On campuses, people who would not tolerate even an inadvertent slur against any other victimized group, claim a right to demean and defame Jewish students and professors, employing the familiar tropes of the longest hatred. 

What’s inappropriate here? The mistake here has to do with the nature of a college campus. Campuses are spaces marked out for the specialized purpose of education. Words that demoralize or frighten should not be tolerated in those spaces. 

For analogous reasons, we don’t allow audible slurs, targeting doctors, nurses or patients, to be repeated in the corridors of hospitals. The space of a hospital has the specialized purpose of healing the sick and the wounded. Neither should such conduct be tolerated in the space of an educational institution.

Readers, this can’t be a difficult point. If it were hard, I wouldn’t be able to think of it.

What’s it all about, this wave of “anti-zionism” – coming most vocally from those who claim to combat Oppression in every form? Minorities are oppressed in China. Dissenters are killed or imprisoned in Iran, and now again in Russia. North Korea is a country where one’s only hope would be to manage an escape. There are well-confirmed reports of torture and extrajudicial killings by the thousands in Venezuela. Cuba continues to function as a repressive dictatorship. The Palestinian Authority continues to govern for many years beyond its last scheduled authorization from voters. Under Hamas in Gaza, children are pressed into service to dig the notorious tunnels that lead up to and under the borders of Israel. They die in those tunnels. Yet, in these and like cases, defenders of the Oppressed say nothing.

I’ve read of two elderly Jews who, in 1945, walked side by side through the gates of a Nazi concentration camp from which they’d just been liberated. The one turned to the other and remarked, 

     “Now at least they’ll have to stop blaming us for everything.”

     “No,” his companion replied. “They’ll find a way to blame us for this too!”

So why? Why the Jews? Do I have a theory? Surely so odd and recurrent a phenomenon deserves attention from philosophers of history and historians! I’ve read Kojeve’s theory of history, Marx’s theory and Hegel’s originating theory. None of them have a convincing explanation – one that covers the cases – for this phenomenon.

In fact, I do have a good explanation, though it’s not an original one. An answer that to me sounds right is provided in Genesis, the opening book of the Bible. Here it is.

Adam and Eve have just been kicked out of their pre-lapsarian paradise —and kicked into history. From here on, they’ll have to work for a living, suffer the pains and joys of asymmetrical relations between the sexes, and – sooner or later – die. Welcome to my world and yours!

As happens in my world and yours, the first couple also have kids: two boys. Mazel tov. What a happy day! However, by the time they grow up, Abel has figured out how to relate to the Creator. In contrast, for whatever reason, his brother Cain hasn’t. That’s okay. No harm done. We each proceed at our own pace, for our own individual reasons.

Had Cain politely asked his brother to explain whatever Abel knows about this unclear challenge of living with God in history, Abel – who’s a nice fellow – would probably have been happy to share what he knows.

But Cain thinks it would be swifter and more “authentic” to do what he’d really rather do, which is … kill his brother.

You see?

That’s why they call it

a good book!

Related Reading: Christians, Jews, and The Great Rift | Can Sibling Rivalry Be Ontological? | Ancestors

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Understanding Evil

Posted on October 3, 2023 by Abigail

understanding evil

Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf. By Robert Loftin Newman ca. 1886.

The French say, to understand all is to forgive all – but, where evil is concerned, forgiving all would be a bad idea.

I have written a whole book on the topic, called (accurately enough) A Good Look at Evil. I wrote it because I’d met the reality, but had not read anything in philosophy, my field, that was helpful.

What sort of help did I have in mind? First, I wanted help recognizing it. Second, I wanted help dealing with it.

Philosophers have defined evil negatively, privatively, as the absence of some quality or feature that is good. Thus, it would be explained by the lack of needed knowledge, the missing order in the psyche, the default on the part of those who should have provided a good example, the failure of early training, the dearth of common necessities, the shortfall in desired advantages.

The trouble was, there were people whose lives went forward without many of these desiderata, but still turned out okay! Whereas, by contrast, I’d met people festooned from an early age with many of the good things – whose absence has been deemed explanatory – who still had become sly and dangerous individuals.

In my book, I did not try to go down the psychic tunnel inside such people. Frankly, I was scared to do that. I just laid out ways of recognizing the bad guys as well as ways to avoid being fooled by their ingenious disguises. I think that’s what the great writers of fiction do, when they deal with the subject at all. Out of commendable prudence, they seldom try to climb inside.

I’m not sure I can do much better now. But I can round up a few more particulars than I managed to gather earlier. This can be helpful because, without much in the way of literary or philosophic guidance, people are left more vulnerable than they should be.

By the way, what about religious authorities? Wouldn’t this be the time for them to step up and fill the gap? Good if they can, but rogues can put on religious disguises as smoothly as any other masquerade. To borrow another French saying, 

L’habit ne fait pas le moine.

The habit (the religious costume) doesn’t make the monk. A potential victim is still obliged to exercise personal discernment. That can’t be farmed out. 

I have seen people who were well-educated, in safe material circumstances, exhibiting no sign of any personal crisis – nevertheless come under the influence of a wolf of outsized malice. In consequence of that influence, they adopted coarser patterns of speech, showed less sensitivity and care in their personal relations, and became less trustworthy overall. 

Such changes seemed inexplicable. Those real individuals to whom I refer hadn’t lost a war, gone bankrupt, been cheated on by their spouses or suffered bodily injury. They hadn’t been isolated from their peers or terrorized. They simply changed, as if under a spell! 

So far as I could tell, the only thing different was that they had come under malign influence. So, there’s at least one thing about its dangers that I’d failed to put in my book:

evil is contagious.

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Atonement and Forgiveness

Posted on September 26, 2023 by Abigail

Atonement and Forgiveness

Fall in the Gatineau Hills, 2008. By tsaiproject.

This week, when Jewish time has been flowing between the New Year 5781 and the sacrosanct Day of Atonement, I have asked a couple of people I know for forgiveness. It’s the time of year when this is required, for any wrong one has done to another. 

I can’t imagine anyone performing this duty with ease, which is doubtless one reason why these are called the Days of Awe. For my part, I can’t recall ever having done it at any time before this past week. Whether it’s easy or hard, 

till now,

I never did it.

So what’s different now? What made me do it this time round? Only that, this season, I felt the Drumbeat of Urgency. There was Something blocking my path and I did not feel as if I could get round it. 

The protocol for the Days of Awe has it that, before you can effectively pray to God for forgiveness on the Day of Atonement, you must first square it with the persons you have injured. Your fellow mortals.

Until you’ve done that, don’t even send God a letter! The Lord won’t open it! God doesn’t want to hear from you, and will be disinclined to help you till you’ve made it good – or as good as you can – with the ones you hurt.

The odd thing was, I could literally feel it – the force of this protocol! Ordinarily, it’s not particularly rare for me to sense the Shekinah, the presence of God, in one way or another. Not this week. I felt like someone trying to get past the glass door behind which she sees the lights of a party to which she was not invited.

Sorry. Got to show

your invitation.

Got to show a real one!

Not that thing. 

It was worse than being snubbed socially by The Beautiful People. Not only are you not invited – but you know it!

So what happened after I asked the ones I had injured for forgiveness? One of the people, to whom I sent my spelled-out-in-some-detail regrets, responded so handsomely, so lovingly, that it actually felt as if the whole world had undergone extensive repairs. The other one, also a congregant, has not responded as yet.

The third injured party was the one I couldn’t find. That injury dates back to the first years after we’d both graduated from Barnard College. I hadn’t thought of the incident in years, or perhaps even considered it an injury at all. Only now did I get a sense of what my words might have meant to her!

We’d both majored in philosophy. She became a psychotherapist. I became … whatever I became. There was a time when, some years later, she happened to befriend the man who would turn out to become my first husband. When John told her that he hoped to marry her college friend Abigail, any bitterness she might have felt did not prevent her saying to him, “You couldn’t do better. She’s the best!”

John later reported to me that she expressed alarm after he’d boasted to her that, during all the months of courtship, we had never had a fight. In the realms of psychotherapy, I gather that’s not a good sign. Whatever the merits of psychoanalytic lore, those people do have experience. She’d been right to be alarmed. John and I couldn’t work out our differences and our marriage did not last.

Unrepaired injuries don’t go away. So I very much wanted to contact her again. However, I was not successful. She was not in the online Album of my college class. I looked through my calendar books but none contained her number. Whether or not she’s still in the Book of Life, at this point the injury I did her looks irreparable. I am sorry. Despite what I implied at the time, it was not her fault. It was mine. That said, it might be that I get some points for trying, since I sense that now, once more,

I can get

the Divine Presence

on the line.

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