Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column

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.

The Desecration of Desire

Posted on February 10, 2026 by amanda horgan

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

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

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

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

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

*. *. *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Desire loses its vector – its directional character.
One has trouble remembering what it was that one personally wanted.
Directionless, one can more readily be had for the taking.

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

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

the inversion of culture –

and the emptying out

of meaningful human history.

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Is There Still Any “Woman Question”?

Posted on February 3, 2026 by Abigail

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is no woman question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

relearn it

from the ground up.

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What’s Missing?

Posted on January 27, 2026 by Abigail

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anything that rings wrong?

Well yes, three things:

Mrs. Ralph Waldo Emerson did Henry David Thoreau’s personal laundry once a week, although we never see her tiptoe discretely across the ground that lies back of Walden Pond.
Pre-adolescent girls, children of the grownups in the ashram, were placed naked alongside Gandhi in the bed where he slept each night. The Mahatma claimed that this was a fail-safe way for him to test his commitment to celibacy. So far as I know, the mature women, who in childhood had furnished this test, continued to maintain a loyal (though possibly embarrassed) silence.
Socrates sent away the mourning women (including his soon-to-be widowed wife Xantippe) before conducting the final dialogue with his disciples that’s recorded in The Phaedo. At the conclusion of that conversation, he drank the lethal hemlock to which the Athenian jury had condemned him.

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

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

how in future

women could appear

in all their own imperfect reality

inside equivalent adventures.

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Persons Real and Unreal

Posted on January 20, 2026 by Abigail

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

they continue to go on your spiritual report card.

By contrast, here are some real people:

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Athens versus Jerusalem?

Posted on January 13, 2026 by Abigail

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

bear witness.

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Who Was Jesus?

Posted on January 6, 2026 by Abigail

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

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

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

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

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

1. What did Jesus think of his achievement,

when he looked back over his life and mission at the time of the Last Supper?

2. What did Jesus think of human history?

3. What is original in the teaching of Jesus?

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

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

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

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

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

Sound familiar?

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

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

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

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

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

welcome him back home.

Related Content: Jesus | When the Stones Speak

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The Stroke of Lightning

Posted on December 30, 2025 by Abigail

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*. *. *

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

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

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

uh oh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We took what had befallen us as leading us aright.

And we weren’t mistaken.

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, Confessions of a Young Philosopher, 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, Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions, 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, Renaissance, 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 absolute risk, antiromantic skepticism, Brooklyn Connections vs Core Curriculum, choice at the crossroads, Coup de foudre, Dante and Beatrice, Dante’s Divine Comedy, detachment of the observer, Edmund Husserl, failing to rise above it, failing to stay detached, first kiss, Jerry Martin and Abigail Rosenthal, knowing you are in love, life choice, maintaining detachment, meaningful kiss, meaningful relationship, Medieval romance and gnosticism, Medieval romance and otherworldly, Medieval romance as model, medieval romance as subversive, mistaking infatuation with love, mutual attraction, no guarantees in love, obeying the summons of love, observer and observed, peak experience, phenomenological bracketing, phenomenological reduction, resisting the summons of love, rising above it, Romance, romance in fiction, romance in psychology, romance novels, Romantic Love, romantic risks, saving Brooklyn College, Saving the Brooklyn College Core in The New York Post, Saving the Brooklyn Core in The Jewish Daily Forward, saving the core curriculum, Saving the Core in The Chronicle of Higher Education, self awareness, self deception, skeptical of romance, the meaning of a first kiss, the stroke of lightning, The Stroke of Lightning vs societal norms, the summons of love, Tristan and Iseult, two paths in the wood | 1 Comment

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