Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column

My Identity Problem

Posted on April 21, 2026 by Abigail

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

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

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

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

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

*. *. *

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

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

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

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

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

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

has just one member.

Posted in Absolute Freedom and Terror, absurdism, academe, action, afterlife, agnosticism, alienation, American politics, anthropology, anti-semitism, appreciation, art, art of living, atheism, authenticity, autonomy, bad faith, beauty, Bible, Biblical Archeology, Biblical God, bigotry, books, bureaucracy, childhood, chivalry, Christianity, cities, class, Confessions of a Young Philosopher, conformism, contemplation, contradictions, cool, courage, courtship, cults, cultural politics, culture, desire, Desire and Authenticity, dialectic, erotic life, eternity, ethics, ethnicity, evil, existentialism, exploitation, faith, fashion, fatherhood, female power, femininity, feminism, filial piety, films, freedom, friendship, gender balance, glitterati, Gnosticism, guilt and innocence, health, Hegel, hegemony, heroes, hidden God, hierarchy, history, history of ideas, id, idealism, ideality, identity, ideology, idolatry, immorality, immortality, institutional power, Jesus, Jews, journalism, Judaism, law, legal responsibility, life and death struggle, literature, love, male power, Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions, martyrdom, masculinity, master, master/slave relation, medieval, memoir, memory, Messianic Age, mind control, modern women, modernism, moral action, moral evaluation, moral psychology, morality, mortality, motherhood, mysticism, Nihilism, nineteenth-century, non-violence, novels, ontology, oppression, pacifism, past and future, peace, Phenomenology of the Mind, philosophy, poetry, political, political movements, politics, politics of ideas, postmodernism, power, power games, presence, promissory notes, propaganda, psychology, public facade, public intellectual, race, racism, radicalism, reading, reductionism, relationships, religion, remembrance, repairing the culture, roles, romance, romantic love, romanticism, science, scientism, secular, seduction, self-deception, sex appeal, sexuality, slave, social climbing, social construction, social conventions, social ranking, sociobiology, spiritual journey, spiritual not religious, spirituality, status, status of women, suffering, terror, terrorism, the examined life, the problematic of men, the problematic of woman, the profane, the sacred, theism, theology, time, Truth, TV, twentieth century, twenty-first century, Utopia, victimhood, victims, violence, war, work, writing, Zeitgeist | Tagged Abigail L Rosenthal’s Confessions of a Young Philosopher, academia and October 7 2023, academic cheering for atrocities, academic culture, anti-semitism returns, black philosophy students, black students, campus culture, conservative habits of belonging, contemporary culture, cultural trends, fashionable identity, fashions in victims, group belonging, group identification, group of one member, Holocaust memory, identity, identity and belonging, identity crisis, identity politics, identity problem, individual vs collective identity, Israeli family, Israelis and identity, Jewish history, Jewish identity, Jewish survival, liberal habits of denial, majority of one, male privilege, mob psychology, moral identity, Nazi racial classifications, persecution and privilege, persecution and social status, persona and identity, philosophy of identity, playing the victim card, pulling moral rank, self and society, social identity, social norms, socially accepted identity, socially unacceptable identity, victims du jour, white male heterosexual identity, white privilege | 4 Comments

Civilization and Me

Posted on April 14, 2026 by Abigail

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Athens and Jerusalem

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

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

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

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

coming apart at the seams.

On Being Read | Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column

Posted on April 7, 2026 by Abigail

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in appreciation, authenticity, book reviews, books, Confessions of a Young Philosopher, contemplation, memoir, modern women, philosophy, public intellectual, reading, twenty-first century, work, writing, Zeitgeist | Tagged "Confessions of a Young Philosopher", Abigail L. Rosenthal's "Confessions of a Young Philosopher", book review | 1 Comment

How Odd, of God

Posted on March 31, 2026 by Abigail

Marc Chagall, *The Exodus* (Knesset tapestry), Jerusalem.
Photo by Dr. Avishai Teicher, via PikiWiki.

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

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

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

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

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

*. *. *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*. *. *

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

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

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

But not everybody can know everything. To some degree,

we are all specialists.

Posted in Absolute Freedom and Terror, absurdism, academe, action, afterlife, agnosticism, alienation, American politics, anthropology, anti-semitism, appreciation, art, art of living, atheism, authenticity, autonomy, bad faith, beauty, Bible, Biblical Archeology, Biblical God, bigotry, book reviews, books, bureaucracy, childhood, chivalry, Christianity, cities, class, conformism, contemplation, contradictions, cool, courage, courtship, cults, cultural politics, culture, desire, Desire and Authenticity, dialectic, eighteenth century, erotic life, eternity, ethics, ethnicity, evil, existentialism, exploitation, faith, fashion, fatherhood, female power, femininity, feminism, filial piety, films, freedom, friendship, gender balance, glitterati, Gnosticism, guilt and innocence, health, Hegel, hegemony, heroes, hidden God, hierarchy, history, history of ideas, id, idealism, ideality, identity, ideology, idolatry, immorality, immortality, institutional power, Jesus, Jews, journalism, Judaism, law, legal responsibility, life and death struggle, literature, love, male power, martyrdom, masculinity, master, master/slave relation, medieval, memoir, memory, Messianic Age, mind control, modern women, modernism, moral action, moral evaluation, moral psychology, morality, mortality, motherhood, mysticism, Nihilism, nineteenth-century, non-violence, novels, ontology, oppression, pacifism, past and future, peace, Phenomenology of the Mind, philosophy, poetry, political, political movements, politics, politics of ideas, postmodernism, power, power games, presence, promissory notes, propaganda, psychology, public facade, public intellectual, race, racism, radicalism, reading, reductionism, relationships, religion, remembrance, Renaissance, repairing the culture, roles, romance, romantic love, romanticism, science, scientism, secular, seduction, self-deception, seventeenth century, sex appeal, sexuality, slave, social climbing, social construction, social conventions, social ranking, sociobiology, spiritual journey, spiritual not religious, spirituality, status, status of women, suffering, terror, terrorism, the examined life, the problematic of men, the problematic of woman, the profane, the sacred, theism, theology, time, Truth, TV, twentieth century, twenty-first century, Utopia, victimhood, victims, violence, war, work, writing, Zeitgeist | Tagged Abigail L. Rosenthal's "Confessions of a Young Philosopher", Anscombe on Wittgenstein: eds Berkman and Teichmann (2025), antisemitism’s deepest causes, being Jewish as an assignment, bigotry among nice people, British philosophers, Chabad, Chabad and Friday night guests, Chabad and guests, Chabad dinner conversation, Chabad Friday night, Chabad rabbi, Chabad rabbinical couple, chasidic dress code, dinner conversation, Elizabeth Anscombe, emotional safety for girls, emotional safety of chasidic girls, empathy as enabler, evil explained away, Friday night dinner, Friday night prayers in Hebrew, healthy family life, Jewish history, Jews in Vienna, lessons of antisemitism, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, making fun of antisemites, modernity and authenticity, modernity and personal risk, modernity and skepticism, modernity vs orthodoxy, moral realism, Orthodox families, Orthodox Jewish families, Orthodox Jewish family life, Orthodox Jewish marriage and children, Orthodox Jews and authenticity, Orthodox ritual handwashing, orthodoxy and deep certainties, orthodoxy and psychological protection, philosophical discussion, recognizing evil, Reform Judaism, specialization in spirituality, spiritual protection, the Wittgensteins in Nazi Vienna, Torah Study, Torah study and liberalism, unique Jewish history, uniqueness of Jewish suffering, well-adjusted families, Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein and Jewish history, Wittgenstein and WWII, Wittgenstein’s Jewish origin, Wittgenstein’s Viennese family | Leave a comment

Book Matters

Posted on March 24, 2026 by Abigail

Why Religion? A Personal Story

By Elaine Pagels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The angels not half so happy in heaven

Went envying her and me …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*. *. *

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

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

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

At any rate,

such wisdom as I have

doesn’t rise to the level

of this tragedy.

Posted in book reviews, books | Tagged book matters, Elaine Pagels’ Why Religion? A Personal Story | 4 Comments

What Jonathan Saw When He Was Dead

Posted on March 17, 2026 by Abigail

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

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

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

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

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

His name was Jonathan and he was 75 years old.

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

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

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

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

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

Hell.

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

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

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

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

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

*. *. *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be a straight shooter is

not as simple as it sounds.

Posted in Absolute Freedom and Terror, absurdism, academe, action, afterlife, agnosticism, alienation, American politics, anthropology, anti-semitism, appreciation, art, art of living, atheism, authenticity, autonomy, bad faith, beauty, Bible, Biblical Archeology, Biblical God, bigotry, book reviews, books, bureaucracy, childhood, chivalry, Christianity, cities, class, conformism, contemplation, contradictions, cool, courage, courtship, cults, cultural politics, culture, desire, Desire and Authenticity, dialectic, erotic life, eternity, ethics, ethnicity, evil, existentialism, exploitation, faith, fashion, fatherhood, female power, femininity, feminism, filial piety, films, freedom, friendship, gender balance, glitterati, Gnosticism, guilt and innocence, health, Hegel, hegemony, heroes, hidden God, hierarchy, history, history of ideas, id, idealism, ideality, identity, ideology, idolatry, immorality, immortality, institutional power, Jesus, Jews, journalism, Judaism, law, legal responsibility, life and death struggle, literature, love, male power, martyrdom, masculinity, master, master/slave relation, medieval, memoir, memory, Messianic Age, mind control, modern women, modernism, moral action, moral evaluation, moral psychology, morality, mortality, motherhood, mysticism, Nihilism, nineteenth-century, non-violence, novels, ontology, oppression, pacifism, past and future, peace, Phenomenology of the Mind, philosophy, poetry, political, political movements, politics, politics of ideas, postmodernism, power, power games, presence, promissory notes, propaganda, psychology, public facade, public intellectual, race, racism, radicalism, reading, reductionism, relationships, religion, remembrance, repairing the culture, roles, romance, romantic love, romanticism, science, scientism, secular, seduction, self-deception, sex appeal, sexuality, slave, social climbing, social construction, social conventions, social ranking, sociobiology, spiritual journey, spiritual not religious, spirituality, status, status of women, suffering, terror, terrorism, the examined life, the problematic of men, the problematic of woman, the profane, the sacred, theism, theology, time, Truth, TV, twentieth century, twenty-first century, Utopia, victimhood, victims, violence, war, work, writing, Zeitgeist | Tagged afterlife and earthly rank, afterlife experiences, afterlife meeting with Jesus, afterlife reports, afterlife reunions, afterlife wonderful ambiance, AJ Ayer, becoming a straight shooter, being what you are, being who you are, Brooklyn accent, cleaning woman’s wisdom, competing religious brands, death and personal identity, earthly honors, envying afterlife visitations, evidence of truthfulness, fraudulent vs genuine, hell’s intentional fire, hellfire’s fine distinctions, honest humility, humility as a pose, Jesus as afterlife escort, Jesus as nondenominational, Jonathan’s afterlife report, judgement after death, Khamenei's message from hell, living inside your theories, natural unpretentiousness, Only the Dead Know Brooklyn, recognizing Jesus, religious rivalry, seeing Khamenei in hell, shedding pretense, signs of credibility, signs of honesty, simplicity and complexity, slight Eastern European accent, sobering afterlife vision, straight shooter, surviving death, telling the truth, testing philosophic theories, the just and the unjust, the soul’s accountability, theoretical world versus habitable world, unexpected natural death, visiting hell in the afterlife, What Ayer Saw When He Was Dead, you can’t take it with you | Leave a comment

Birth and Rebirth Days

Posted on March 10, 2026 by Abigail

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remembering is a power of the spirit.

The Unexpected

Posted on March 3, 2026 by Abigail

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The Israelis have rescued the hostages!”

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

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

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

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

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

*. *. *

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

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

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

the unexpected always happens.

What’s Your Spiritual Story: Abigail’s Confessions on Childhood, Time, and Spiritual Awakening

Posted on February 24, 2026 by Abigail

Abbie is in California this week for health treatments. She asks me to send the video below, where she and her husband, Jerry L. Martin from God: An Autobiography, The Podcast, discuss her early life from childhood’s moments of truth up through the story of her twenties told in Confessions of a Young Philosopher.

World-Historical Lives: Winston Churchill and Hannah Senesh

Posted on February 17, 2026 by Abigail

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

how the story will come out.

Why Religion? A Personal Story

By Elaine Pagels

Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column

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