“You have the Jewish essence,” I was once told by a friend. “But you don’t have Jewish existence.”

The verdict had been pronounced by my late friend Milton Schubin, who was then a partner in a powerful New York law firm where he represented, in his own words, “Texaco and Abigail Rosenthal.” During my seven-year struggle to regain my job as assistant professor of philosophy at Brooklyn College of The City University of New York, Milton provided unpaid but priceless legal advice. His wife had been one of my father’s devoted philosophy students. And in this conversation, Milton was certainly correct about me on my Jewish side.

I looked at the Jewish pathway or hodos (life-method) conceptually, rather than absorbing it as a field of practices and a way of life. It had a lot to do with my background, of course. My mother descended from a long rabbinic line. On her side, in my younger days, I had Israeli relatives in high and consequential places. Her father, my grandfather, bore, I thought in childhood, a physical resemblance to God. (I mean, I never objected to the idea of God as an old man with a white beard!) 

However, although my father too had been in the rabbinate as a young man, he left that life. When he did, he pulled up the drawbridge behind him. He hadn’t quit out of disbelief. Far from it. Being a rabbi simply wasn’t a good fit for him. With the result that I was not raised to enjoy comfortable familiarity with Jewish ritual practices. Instead I was left, as I sometimes said, “Jewish in the head” – not in the shaping weave of irreplaceable life-habits.

By now, it’s a bit late to repeal this personal history. Nonetheless, there’s been one recent change, or slight readjustment, that’s worth recording. Sorry, but it’s not about deciding to keep a kosher diet or observe the Jewish calendar holidays more faithfully. It’s about … a past life.

Are there past lives? Can we credit reports of such seeming memories? What’s the Jewish take on those questions? From what I gather, Jewish wariness about the occult has been fairly continuous, going as far back as recorded Jewish time. As one example, in Maine, when my mother worked with the douser to discover where to dig a well, my father left the house. The douser’s recommendation turned out to be quite right and saved us a mint of money. Wariness is not the same as skepticism. Rather, it’s grounded in the commonsensical understanding that such experiences, whether of something real or something unreal, can be destabilizing, morally, psychologically and spiritually.

For that reason, it’s not a good idea to cultivate such experiences, or indulge the appetite for them. There may well be ghosts, but don’t go chasing ‘em. (If anybody’s still reading, they’ve been warned.)

Anyway, for whatever reason, I do carry a memory (or persuasive imagining) of the way I died in the life I had before this one. I was a young German-Jewish woman in the early 1930’s, living in semi-seclusion along with others who were either family members or friends. Hitler may have come to power just recently. Nazis roamed the streets. They looked for Jews.

Then came the dreaded loud rapping on our front door. Someone must have informed on our semi-hidden enclave. The rest was very quick. We were herded into the street’s broad daylight, hurried and assisted in our climb into the back of an open truck which was then sealed. Carbon monoxide was pumped in. The murders did not take long. 

My clearest memory is of leaving my body and somehow rising high enough to get an answer to my main question: how extensive is this hatred of Jews? What I saw was that it was actually global in its reach. It had only broken to the surface in Germany, the way an illness will break out in the organ that happens to be the weakest, even though meanwhile the whole organism has been affected. My seeming past life memory concluded with my resolve to come back and fight this thing – whether global or not.

So, have I done anything like that? Oh, I suppose so, in my way. I haven’t made a full-time life-work of it. But it’s been one feature of books I’ve written or, from time to time, actions I’ve initiated or aided. So what’s changed in the past week?

It’s just a tiny shift, which I’ll try to explicate. I think the purported past life memory, real or not, has been terribly frightening. The result of the fear has been that I lived the “Jewish essence” full-face, but my particular Jewish existence aslant, at an angle, half-faced away.

So there’s been this slight shift, maybe imperceptible to onlookers. I haven’t started to keep kosher or observe the holidays. You can’t teach this pup that many new tricks. But I’m not living the Jewish assignment aslant any more. I’m living it full face – 

moving into congruence

with such Jewish existence

as I do have.