We are back in Bucks County and home from a conference in San Diego where we each presented our just-published books. The title of mine, as was noted last week, is Confessions of a Young Philosopher and it’s a life work. The meeting where we spoke was one of several in a group called Theology Without Walls under the broader auspices of the American Academy of Religion.

Jerry and I formed part of a five-member panel where the authors spoke in turn about each of five new books. The books form a series whose only common element is that each one navigates the relation between the human situation and the Ultimate, without at the outset defining that relation in terms approved by any of the established religions. Though they might end up in an established religion, the writers don’t begin there. At least at the start, their human search is wide open.

I was pretty nervous, talking about my book to this audience of theologians. It tells a true story, one that took place in my twenties, the first decade of adult life, a story that people who came to know me later didn’t know – because I didn’t talk about it! Doesn’t Descartes (the 17th century philosopher) say somewhere, “Henceforth I will appear on stage the way an actor does – masked”? Well, I wasn’t exactly masked (wasn’t wearing a false face) but I wasn’t fully disclosed either.

In consequence, I was in a rather upset state inwardly as I gave my presentation, and couldn’t see that (as was later reported to me) the audience was gripped by it, applauding with enthusiasm at the end. Afterward, one professor from Africa told me that he planned to assign Confessions to his students as required reading. Another listener, a multi-talented, multiply-published theologian, came up to tell me that my paper led him to take more seriously the Socratic life strategy of living out one’s beliefs insofar as one takes them to be true.

*. *. *

There was, however, one set of views that I hold but did not live out during the three-day theological conference. Those would be the cluster of historically-grounded views supporting my overarching belief that it is right and proper for the Jewish people to defend the Jewish state, to defend Israel. Rightly or wrongly, I supposed the assembled attendees to be mostly people of a certain type. Let me describe the kind of person I had in mind.

It’s a human type whom the German novelist, poet, playwright, and natural philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) introduced to the reading public in his Sorrows of Young Werther under the category of the Beautiful Soul. Such persons can be counted on to look ever upwards – toward the ideal, the pure, and the lofty. At the gritty pavement on which they stand, they don’t look quite so much.

In a contrasting mindset – honed and shaped by approximately 1800 years of defamation and violent persecution culminating in the Holocaust – the Jewish people concluded in 1948 that it was time to make their longed-for political restoration actual, in a state having defensible boundaries and an army to defend it. Assuredly, their resolve did include beautiful dreams, but it was not born of such dreams. It was actualized with the U.N. vote for partition in 1948, and by beating back the invasion by five Arab states that together had rejected the U.N. resolution. It was only realized when all the other alternatives had been thoroughly exhausted. “Where were we supposed to go?” as one concentration camp survivor said to me: “the North Sea?”

When Israel voluntarily pulled its settlers out of Gaza in 2005, Gazans voted to be governed by Hamas. The founding charter of Hamas calls for the murder of every Jew on the planet. The boastful massacres of October 7, 2023, together with its gleeful tortures and sadistic kidnappings, were perpetrated by Hamas, whose operatives photographed the carnage they had wrought and promised repetitions without limit. In Gaza, Hamas operatives have been encamped in approximately 300 miles of tunnels, with arms stored under schools, hospitals and apartment houses. When the Israel Defense Forces go after Hamas, trying – to a degree unprecedented in modern warfare – to give civilians advance warning and time to escape, the results can still be tragic in those Hamas-crafted circumstances. But disempowering such an enemy is what any state so attacked would have to do.

There were a couple of moments during the conference when one Beautiful Soul or another let me know that their sights were set far higher than the IDF’s earth-bound sights. Meantime, though many world religions were referenced in fine and varied presentations, I did not hear Judaism mentioned. Except once, when I mentioned it in the context of a particular Q & A. The usual religious groupings would be “Christianity, Islam” and uh … Buddhism, Hinduism or Confucianism!

So I guess Jesus had it wrong when, strange as it seems, he actually said –

salvation is of the Jews.

When you don’t acknowledge a presence, you’re less likely to notice an absence. Conceptual erasure opens the way to physical erasure.

The Beautiful Souls want to start doing theology with a clean slate. But without looking down long enough to notice that –

there may be Jewish blood

on their clean slate.

Related Content: The Color of the Sky