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.