Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column

Must Our Stories Come Out Right?

Posted on July 11, 2023 by Abigail

Adams Memorial by Augustus Saint-Gaudens.
Photo by David.

In my passage from childhood to young girlhood, there were two stories I relied on for clues about the life that lay ahead of me. The first was Homer’s Odyssey. The second was Joseph and His Brothers (from Genesis 37-50) – as retold in four volumes by Thomas Mann!

In both stories, which concern their respective hero’s long and dangerous voyage home, the divine element enters to help shape the plot, prevent the enemies-of-the-story from prevailing and finally bring all the unruly subplots together to make the whole thing come out right.

Thus, Odysseus gets home to Ithaca from the Trojan War and kills all the young swells who’ve been consuming his estate and paying court to long-suffering Penelope, his presumed rich widow. All along, the hero has had help from Athena, the goddess who favors him. During the showdown fight with the suitors, she takes the form of an owl and watches from the rafters. At the end, the goddess even prolongs the bedtime reunion, restoring the youthful roses to Penelope’s cheeks for that marital night.

Thomas Mann’s version of Joseph’s life may be the best commentary on the best single story in the whole Bible. As it did with Cain and Abel, we see the history-making, fratricidal motif still playing out. The envious brothers sell Joseph, their father’s favorite child, into slavery. They show their father the coat of many colors that he gave Joseph, now bloodied, as evidence that a wild beast must have devoured him. If envy is a wild beast, they’re not lying!

Meanwhile, starting out as a slave in Egypt, Joseph will go through difficult trials before finally rising to be a kind of CEO to Pharoah, the king of Egypt. As Vice Regent, he will oversee the steps needed to prepare for the seven-year famine that he foretells by deciphering Pharoah’s precognitive dreams.

The famine that ensues is of such wide scope that it reaches Canaan and drives Joseph’s brothers to seek provisions in Egypt. They don’t recognize the smooth-shaven, high-level Egyptian official as the brother they sold long ago, but he of course knows them. After putting them through certain covert tests of character, Joseph is satisfied that they’ve grown up – matured ethically and perhaps spiritually. Recognition and reunion follow. The long exile ends, as happily as such things can, if we’re talking about real life.

Although these good stories must have been somewhere in the back of my mind by the time I was writing A Good Look at Evil, good stories were not the dominant feature of that book. I wrote it because things had happened in my life that were the reverse of good.

Somehow I’d drawn the attentions of ingenious, effective and durable enemies! At least at the start of their attentions to me, they’d understood me better than I understood them. And, as I came to notice, bystanders would show a striking reluctance to admit that they too had seen this prolonged and extraordinary phenomenon – or to call it by its real name: evil. Hence the title of my book.

Before I thought of writing about it, I searched through the annals of philosophy, as far as I knew them, but did not see much useful on that topic. Theology had terms like “sin,” of which Judaism and Christianity gave partly divergent explanations. But I didn’t come across a book that actually told you how to recognize evil when it came along. I mean, it doesn’t always wear horns and a tail. Some discernment is required!

Most of that book is concerned with the encounter with evil and how to recognize it at its different levels of intensity. Only the last chapter, “God and the Care for One’s Story,” offers a contemporary story that’s not only good but overcomes adversaries all the way to its happy ending.

But notice the title of the final chapter. There’s “God” in it. Like the stories of Odysseus and Joseph, there’s a providential element. This prompts a particular concern in me – one I’ve only recognized recently.

Not everyone CAN live a good story.

Here I’m not thinking about the fact that life stories can end prematurely, or be ground down by bodily suffering, or economic privation, or undeserved social or political reprisals, or even martyrdom at the behest of tyrants. This fact gives rise to what philosophers and theologians call “the problem of evil.” It becomes a theoretical problem if there’s a good and all-powerful God, and many solutions or explanations have been thoughtfully proposed. My problem is a different one.

I’ll give just one illustration of what I have in mind. In the case I’ll describe, the person has died and no surviving relatives are likely to read this. Other examples of the same phenomenon don’t meet these privacy criteria, so I’ll confine my examples to this one.

The young woman I am thinking of had been radiant in her first youth. Unfortunately, her mother’s relation to her was marked by a faint, subsurface, near-disapproval. You wouldn’t necessarily notice it. It was expressed in the mother’s starchy, New England speaking style. The mother was quite likable. Only you wouldn’t want her for your own mother. She discouraged spontaneous expressions of feeling.

In her twenties, the daughter first drowned her natural feelings in alcohol, but fortunately later recovered sobriety and went on to a successful work-life. She was widely admired and held influential positions. She had a few disappointed romantic hopes before she stopped hoping. In the summer when she received a grim medical diagnosis, she told no one that she expected to die soon. Quietly as usual, she put all the things for which she was responsible into good order. Her memorial service was a moving celebration of an achieved life of a certain type.

What she never knew was that her starchy mother had been, as a young girl, easily and widely available sexually because her weight problem led her to see herself as unable to attract men by any other means than that one.

So the wifely and maternal “starchiness” had been the mother’s lifelong cover story. She had genuine and fine qualities, but I’ve underscored the one I believe relevant to her daughter’s womanly life.

I knew the secret her daughter couldn’t know. Out of respect for her mother, and for her, I never breathed a word of it to anyone.

At the start of the daughter’s life, a few life clues were conveyed to her, to be figured out and made sense of, as best she could. Of other clues – that might have deepened her self-comprehension, and widened her chances for happiness – she was deprived.

She made wonderful use of the restricted ingredients she had. They did not include the raw materials for happiness.

I feel the sorrows of her life
and can’t say more.

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The Owl of Minerva Takes Flight

Posted on July 4, 2023 by Abigail

Minerva with Owl. 2nd century CE.
Louvre, Paris, France. Photo by Janmad.

“The owl of Minerva takes flight only at dusk.” So wrote G. W. F. Hegel, the nineteenth century’s major philosopher of history. By that he meant that any given phase of history can be understood only in retrospect – after it’s over. Minerva was of course the goddess of wisdom and the owl her particularly wise old bird.

Since even Hegel, who claimed to understand history, disclaimed any such power with regard to future – or even present – events, I should certainly not try to discover the secret springs of our current historical phase.

I shouldn’t try, but I can’t help it. I’m curious. Besides, I do think that each of us is living out the story of her own life, and must inevitably be tempted to attach the defining concerns of that personal story to comparable large ones that extend into the story of humanity at the present hour.

So – with some allowances made for how easily I can be mistaken – how does the Big Picture look to me now? Let’s climb aboard the owl and fly around long enough to see the lay of the land.

The owl looks for wisdom, wherever it’s likely to be found. So, shouldn’t we first look at the natural sciences with their present puzzlements? From my bird’s eye view, I’ve been lately getting the impression that previous assumptions, about life happening on our earth as the result of chance combinations of chemicals, can no longer be sustained by those who know how numerous and intricate are the combinations in a single cell – beyond what chance alone could explain.

It now appears that the production of life – of self-replicating creatures that subsequently follow a Darwinian course of natural selection – couldn’t be an accident. Also that the same improbability confronts the biochemists with the later appearance of consciousness. And still later, at the human level, there’s inherent purposiveness which operates in a manner inexplicable just in terms of the principles at work at lower levels of complexity. It’s beginning to look as if nature might be purposive through and through.

Back in high school, we were taught that teleology (the view that purposes inhere in nature itself) had been discredited. Turns out, that’s unlikely to be true. Teleology might be the next big thing! Which would give philosophy, and perhaps theology, some new work to do.

Moving further along the sky lanes, the owl is now trying to get a sense for the present range of human purposes. The aerial view is quite puzzling to the owl. It sees the grey haze of skepticism settling over the humanistic disciplines and diversions of Western Europe as well as the English-speaking world.

Unlike ancient skepticism, the contemporary kind is not just doubt about whether we can know anything with certainty. It gets into deeper levels, raising doubts about whether there are such things as inbuilt desires, for example erotic desires, that derive from our biological natures. So, just as teleology – the view that every species is shot through with natural purposes – is starting to look inescapable in biochemistry and allied fields, natural purposes have fallen quite out of favor in the humanities.

The owl scratches its feathered head.

Let me help the owl. If you wanted to control a human being – without going to the trouble of isolating your target for ceaseless denunciation and coerced confessions – then the thing to do would be to put your victim out of touch with his or her natural desires. Subject a person’s desires to continuous and arbitrarily elastic redefinition – reinforced by the threat of social and professional ostracism – and voila! you can control your targeted person without physical coercion. It’s a means of gaining power at least as effective as the now-outmoded styles of brainwashing described in Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984, and later reported in Robert Lifton’s actual account of mind control as practiced on captured American prisoners during the Korean War – and it’s so much cheaper!

Flying further, beyond democracies corroded by erotic manipulation and real tyrannies no longer able to credit their own ideological rationales – and what now do we see happening on our green earth down below?

Some years ago, Francis Fukuyama wrote a book titled The End of History. In it, he argued that no system of political thought remains credible – all others having by now discredited themselves – except for liberal democracy. In that sense, Fukuyama held, we have all entered the unsurpassable, world-historical era of liberal democracy!

Are there any signs that Fukuyama may have been right?

There is Ukraine.

There is a nation where a genuine historical eros animates a whole people to perceive and prefer liberal democratic values. We also see that seemingly skeptical nations, where those values were once harbored and thought through, are suddenly acting as if jerked awake and rousing themselves to support that people’s fight.

In such moments, there is nothing of skepticism.

Only a coming home

to self-recognition.

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Women, Women, Women

Posted on June 27, 2023 by Abigail

Botticelli. The Birth of Venus (c. 1484–1486).

I know of two instances where fair-minded young mothers brought their child custody disputes before a judge. In each case, the fact that the judge turned out to be a woman caused the plaintiff’s heart to sink, anticipating the worst – quite accurately, as it turned out.

At the start of my own seven-year fight to get my job back at Brooklyn College, I sought the help of a faculty feminist committee on campus. The real reason I was fired had to do (in the words of the eventual Arbitrator) with a departmental fight over “power, perks and privileges.” But I thought the faculty women might be interested, if only because language insulting to women had been part of the damning teacher observation report that supported my firing.

However, I had badly miscalculated since, prominent among the faculty feminists, was a woman in the bloc that had fired me. Not only did the feminists decline to support a battered woman colleague. They went to the lengths of an official letter to my chairman advising him that my case was of zero concern to Brooklyn College feminists!

In fact, it was the only time in the long fight when I came down with a two-week cold in reaction to something that happened in the course of the fight.

Examples multiply. I know of a lifelong activist who attributed her breast cancer to the year she spent, in the movement’s early days, on the in-fighting editorial board of a leading feminist magazine!

What’s really happening in such cases? When we try to balance the books on feminism – what we’ve won and what we’ve lost – why are stories of this kind routinely kept “off the books”?

Usually, when I need light on a pathway in history, I turn to philosophy. One of the early modern arguments for legal equality for women is found in John Stuart Mill’s On the Subjugation of Women (1869). Written in collaboration with his beloved Harriet Taylor, it’s an attempt to fit the liberation of women into the wider utilitarian program, whose aim was “the greatest happiness for the greatest number, each man [that is, each person] to count for one” – and no more than one. It was hoped that such a rational standard could erase all inherited privilege, including that of men over women. Insofar as politics takes account of women, they are just the same as men.

Mill’s devotion to Harriet Taylor reminded me of a passage toward the end of Tolstoy’s War and Peace where Pierre, reunited with his true love, becomes – like her – a feminist. His progressive turn occurs after he hears the woman he loves speaking up in favor of legal rights for unmarried women. He intuits her meaning: had he not given her his husbandly protection, she might have been one of them.

Factual or fictional, these were cases where a reflective and ardent lover has thrown the broadly inclusive mantle of feminism over the shoulders of the woman he’s singled out for male protection of the most extensive kind.

I will protect you (he is saying),

and all who are like you.

But where is the woman who is a philosopher in her own right and can lay out the intellectual foundation for this vast rearrangement of the human story?

Surely that woman must have been Simone de Beauvoir who, in The Second Sex, first laid out such a groundwork. “I have long hesitated to write a book about women,” she begins, in Vol I (1949). Her philosophical argument is that there is no essence of the feminine. A woman becomes what society deems her to be, and the acculturation process is typically difficult and deforming. One has to learn how to be what they call “a woman.” It’s like a dance, with a precise pattern of steps. But if you can’t or won’t do the dance, you’ll be stigmatized.

Her case histories, drawn from memoirs, biographies and reports from the relevant scientific disciplines, richly illustrate her thesis. So did the death threats she received after the book was published.

But what was the philosophic ground on which Beauvoir’s renewal of feminism in the twentieth century would rest? It rested on Being and Nothingness, which was the major work by the French existentialist, Jean-Paul Sartre. The argument of Sartre’s work is that all the traits of human personality derive from arbitrary choice, which a person can change freely, from one moment to the next. Thus, there is no fixed human nature. Ergo, there is no feminine nature either. We can recognize these postulates as having passed into the assumptions of post-modernism, where they continue to be taken for granted.

If Beauvoir’s thesis depends on Sartre’s philosophy, what was he to her? He was her deepest love, her closest friend and ally – erotic, intellectual and political. And how did he regard her? He made infidelity the liberating motif of their relationship, eventually depending on her to supply cooperative younger women. Having thus betrayed her on every feasible man-to-woman level, he even put his literary estate in the hands of someone else. She, his titular widow and chief mourner, emerged from their lifelong relationship with nothing.

And what of her philosophic foundation for feminism? We can see its steady, cumulative exfoliation from here. Having deemed that femininity has neither biological nor ontological foundation, Beauvoir’s feminism has left women without grounds to protest the presence of men in their footraces, locker rooms or prison cells.

Ladies, sisters, looks like it’s about time to go back to the drawing board.

We don’t have a theory!

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Witness

Posted on June 20, 2023 by Abigail

McGuffey’s Readers, Eclectic Primer, 1909.

How important is it to be witnessed? I think we’re built to view it as pretty important. It’s close to the heart of motivation. We don’t want “no one to know.”

“As God is my witness,” we say, to underscore how seriously we take what we’ve affirmed. Right, but we’d rather not have God be the only one who believes us.

I’ve more than once encountered people who were players with me, in the same real-life scenes, but have since erased some particular act from their memory – a key act on which the ensuing drama turned – which they no longer care to remember.

In one case, a senior colleague, who’d got me fired for refusing to vote for his candidate for chairman, later asked me – about the same individual he’d once backed –

“Who hired that guy?”

Of course, I was too nice to remind him that I’d undergone a seven-year struggle to get my job back after I’d asked him, in effect, that very question.

In my local temple, when I’d protested the presence of a predator then preying on women congregants, a board member phoned me to say that my objections had “legal implications,” which meant that no one should meet with me except in the presence of a lawyer. His call came shortly after an agreed-upon meeting with other board members at our home had been cancelled without notice or apology to us, the hosts. Although the predator did finally get ousted, the whole experience was quite shocking to me. Eventually, as part of my own effort to cure a trauma that got worse over a period of years, I made an effort to contact the board member who had made the call.

Frustratingly, he retained no memory of having ever made any such phone call! Since Jerry had also gotten on the phone during his call, I did have a witness. Finally, after an interval where we continued to talk back and forth around the incident, some fragments of recollection eventually returned to my erstwhile caller who did express his regret.

What’s the implication of such stories? For normal people, not suffering from some pathology, memory itself seems to have pretty high standards and keep rather strict accounts. It may find witnessing a past deed intolerable if close inspection can’t also deliver exoneration.

In recent days, I’ve been struggling with the memory of a long sequence of efforts, over a period of years – at some cost to me in time, money and (in the final instance) trauma – to defend my temple as God’s house and the institutional face of the Jewish covenant in this locality and … what with recent turnover of personnel, membership, and newer crises nearer to hand, it seems that …

no one remembers or cares.

The oubliette (or forgettery) was where, before the Revolution, French aristocrats could consign people whose presence they found inconvenient. These were deep dungeons where protesters were kept in solitary confinement and no one ever knew what became of them. Minus the picturesque, ancien regime trappings, the forgettery is just where I feel I’ve been relocated.

Maybe God knows. I assume divinity does. But God wasn’t the only witness to the track record to which I allude here. It’s not a question of gaining credit. It’s having a story to share that really happened! A true story!

Why is that so important? I have the impression that, when people descend into cynicism, what they really feel is that no one knows. No one cares. No one sees me. No one could testify on my behalf.

There are some people, perhaps philosophers or religionists, who think that every single meritorious deed etches its own indelible place in eternity. If it happened at any time, seen or unseen, then it’s eternally true that it happened and nothing – no deep dark oubliette – can take that truth away.

I admire that thought, but I’m a bit too literal-minded to share it. To my mind, ordinary remembering means a lot.

Some years ago, I had an invitation to speak at a philosophical conference in Louisville, Kentucky, the town where my father was born and spent his boyhood years. I carried a number of stories about Louisville in my head – inherited memories, as it were.

As the day to leave for Louisville drew nearer, my friend and colleague Elmer Sprague noticed that I was getting rather agitated.

“What’s bothering you?” he kindly asked.

“I will look for my father there, and not find him. The town must have greatly changed.”

Elmer advised me to ask the conference manager to point out an old Louisvillian – there must be one at the conference – who could give me a tour of the parts of town that my father knew. It was first class advice and I followed it.

Initially, my tour guide drove me to the courthouse where my Dad had won the high school honor of standing to read the Declaration of Independence to the celebrants assembled for the Fourth of July.

Like his schoolmates of those days, my father had learned to read from the McGuffey Readers where, if little Timmy decided to cut school and go huntin’ instead, he’d get treed by a bear. And eaten! They had old time religion in Louisville when my father was a boy.

My guide next drove me to the banks of the Ohio. After my father had left Louisville for Columbia College and another life, the river had flooded my grandfather’s small business. They had not been able to afford a shop on higher ground.

Finally, there was the old house. I got the address from my aunt. Standing in front of it and looking up, I saw – as if with hallucinatory clarity – the edges of inherited memory slide into congruence with the front and sides of the real house!

“They kept collie dogs,” I said to my guide, inconsequentially.

To honor someone or something is to keep its place, the place memory has reserved for it. It was in that place for a reason.

The first time I saw modern Israel, looking down from the El Al plane as it circled for a landing, the words that came unbidden to my mind were these:

There it is – again!

How nice!

They’ve put cities down this time!

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From the Horse’s Mouth

Posted on June 13, 2023 by Abigail

*Ivanhoe* by Sir Walter Scott, 1819.
Illustration by C. E. Brock, 1897 ed.

My latest ride at what I shall call The Metaphysical Stables has proved particularly gratifying. This time Legacy, the mid-sized, hairy dog, did not sit on my lap while I waited for Dusty to be saddled and bridled. One front foot of Legacy’s was bandaged because a horse had stepped on it. Naturally, that will discourage leaps on laps for the present.

However, Dusty was ready to take me up a notch, to a sitting trot, which put me in girl-philosopher’s-heaven-on-earth!

As you may recall, this horse is not merely a beautiful animal in motion. Thanks to his interpreter, the gifted young woman who trots alongside me and translates for Dusty, his circles, halts, and loops have communicative power.

(Are you skeptical as to whether any of this can be for real? I’m not trying to convince you. All I will say is that what comes to me from the horse’s mouth contains infinitely more insight than what I got years ago from a Park Avenue psychotherapist whom I paid twice as much per hour. I judge by the results!)

Be that as it may, I remarked to my human guide that recently I’d been “working through” certain configurations in my memory. Even though none of this work has been visible, it has felt monumental. Chiefly, it’s had to do with two figures from my past: my father and my first love.

Of my father, Henry M. Rosenthal, the theologian Thomas Altizer has remarked to me – twice and I quote him: – “I am a sonovabitch; I am a sonovabitch. And there’s only one thing I care about. And that is God. And your father was a man of God.”

My father’s life had its own problematic, its own difficulties. For a fact, it had not been easy to be the daughter of such a man and eventually to become one’s own person. But as of now, I said to the horse and his young woman interpreter, I believed I’d come to understand whatever I still needed to “get” about my father, and was in shape to move on.

With respect to my father, Dusty appeared to concur; by now I am ready to move on. However, it seemed that such was not the case with respect to my first love. There, all had not yet been tallied up as required.

Goodness! I thought, fairly disconcerted. I go through my memories regularly, with a very fine-toothed comb. What could possibly remain to be sifted through?

“You’ve not entered into his mentality – seeing it from his point of view.”

Oh. Okay. I can do that. On occasion, I’ve done it with students who were giving me trouble in class. Just give me a minute here.

“Oh! He still loves me – passionately – and always has!”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“Well, I can’t do anything about that now,” I said. “I’m married to the man who’s the Right One for me, with whom I’m totally in love. And by this time, my first love has got his own fully-furnished life as well.”

“That’s true. Also, if you were ever to be in contact, it would hurt him too much.”

“Hurt him? I never imagined such a thing. Why would he care? He’s become very successful. He’s pushed and shoved his way up to relative prominence within a tightly competitive circle of Parisian intellectuals. I doubt he defends any views that I would think true – but, to the world he occupies, he presents a smoothly assured, varnished-over face.”

“People,” said Dusty, “are never the same as the smooth facades they present to the world.”

“How does that make you feel?” asked my guide, looking up at me.

“Terrific! It’s like that line from Camelot, the Broadway musical:

‘Where’s the knight pining so for me

he leaps to death in woe for me,

where are a maiden’s simple joys?’”

My guide grinned up at me, with womanly understanding.

In fact, as I told Jerry later over dinner, I felt rather elated for the rest of that evening. I’d long supposed that I’d been played for a fool, used and shrugged off, and well, perhaps that had not been quite the case. We’d both, the first love and I, known (and I suppose I’d made clear enough) that the love could not be realized in a life together. So perhaps he too had suffered, and still did in some way, despite the professional success within his small but influential coterie.

However, by morning I saw the whole story differently. I’d been slowly making my way through The Ark of a Covenant, a very big book by Walter Russell Mead, about America and the Jews. That morning, I happened to come on some over-lengthy quotations in Mead’s book, from prominent American anti-semites of the 1920’s. The terms they used – the word-pictures they painted – were aglow with loathing. They shocked me, physically and morally!

I remembered how my first love had made use of his original attraction to me as Jewish to bind me to him, and how later he had again singled out my Jewish identity, but this time negatively and woundingly, to push me into a distance safer for him: good for idealizing but not good enough to warrant simple kindness!

All at once I felt deeply disheartened. Not only deflated with respect to “a maiden’s simple joys.” Also stymied with respect to a deeper summons within my life: to make clearer the part Jews play as God’s pilot project in history.

Maybe it’s simply incurable, anti-semitism, the human refusal of a personal God who acts and relates to us in history. Maybe that perennial refusal will always be projected onto Jews – as the visible object by means of whom that refusal of The Invisible can be acted out in real time – where history happens. I thought of the literary cases, where the ambivalence is illustrated by means of two fictional characters who are apparently polar opposites but really two sides of the same coin: the delectable Jewish maiden and her utterly contemptible father. The motif is in Shakespeare, Walter Scott, G. E. Lessing, even George Eliot. They go together. They make the world’s spiritual ambivalence seem almost livable, almost coherent.

Finally, sitting for meditation this morning, I came to see it more whole. Anti-semitism is not a mere mistake. What’s at issue is a spiritual matter. Reasoning can give support. But only in the context of …

the turning around of the soul.

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Boys, Girls, and Metaphysical Monism

Posted on June 6, 2023 by Abigail

Kandariya Mahadeva Temple, India.
Photo by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra, 2013.

By “metaphysical monism” I mean the view that every kind of variety and difference in the world is ultimately unreal. So what’s real? The One. In reality, the many things we experience are One Thing or – more precisely – One Being. Only apparently is the salt shaker before me different from the glass of V-8 juice in front of my plate. Only apparently are there two things at all. Only apparently am I different from either of them.

It’s not so much that appearances, in the way we see and feel them, are the result of our fallen or tarnished human condition. The latter view would be Gnosticism, which has had a long career in Western cultures, down to the present, under different labels.

Rather, the monistic claim is that the experience of ultimate difference in any form is itself delusive. To realize this is immediately to want to recover from delusion and be free from unreality.

The Western philosopher who stands out for monism was Parmenides (fifth century BCE). His disciple, Zeno, composed a series of challenging paradoxes to show that “the many” cannot be held in thought consistently. Thus, Achilles cannot outrun the hare because, in order to cover any ground in the race, he must first cover half the ground, but before that, cover half of that half, and so on ad infinitum. Philosophers have been working to solve Zeno’s paradoxes ever since, but their work has not prevented them from coping with their variegated experiences or running any race they feel up to running.

It was different in the East. In India for example, metaphysical monism has called its adherents to the practice of yoga. The theory and practice of yoga can be studied in the Yoga Sutras compiled by Patanjali in the first centuries CE, which is long after they were first, archaically formulated and practiced. A colleague introduced me to this compilation, calling Patanjali “the Isaac Newton of yoga.” To make the theory and practice her own, the student needs to attach herself to an adept, preferably an achieved master or guru.

At one point in my life, I did just that. Why? I wasn’t trying to drain the cup of life to the dregs or try every feasible experience once. So why not just muddle along, day to day, doing the best one can, guided by ordinary common sense? What’s wrong with apples and oranges keeping their distinct flavors and colors? Why try to stuff them all into the blender of the One?

I’ll tell you why. In my own personal case, the level of ordinary common sense had become unbearable. I don’t know about you, and whether you happen to have had any gifted and persistent enemies, but I’ve had a few. There was one in particular who, at that point, was gnawing at the vitals of my life. I won’t disclose the person’s sex or relationship to me, but this particular adversary had managed to persuade a fair number of my friends – even colleagues in some cases – to believe damaging fictions about me. As these former life companions were falling away, so was my health.

In short, ordinary life – with its mild and unassuming common sense – was not working out. And I hate for the bad guys to win.

I’d heard of an ashram across town where wholesome vegetarian suppers were reasonably priced and followed by Sanskrit chanting and videos of the guru, reputedly a lovely young Indian woman. In my circumstances, a change of pace and venue seemed like a healthful idea.

After about a month, I decided to join one of their bus trips to the upstate ashram where I could get my own first-hand impression of the guru. When I returned from the upstate weekend, I recall one woman friend asking me what kind of a human being she was.

“She’s not a human being,” I replied, shaking my head, wide-eyed. I had never seen anyone, man or woman, that beautiful or graceful. She seemed to inhabit a charmed space of her own. What I saw appeared to me to have –

escaped the hazards of womanhood

with its subliminal awareness

of vulnerability.

Why then did I ever leave? Did I simply decide that I could never achieve what she had achieved? How would I even know that, without giving it an extended Old College Try? No. Let me tell you exactly why I left.

I was upstate for another weekend at the ashram. As soon as I arrived, I noticed that there’d been a few changes. For one thing, the female swamis were now wearing lipstick. In their red nuns’ robes, they didn’t look good in lipstick. It was garish. Over the loudspeaker, one heard an announcement that each newcomer would have a senior member assigned to her for the weekend. This instituting of a “minder” put me on high alert immediately. It seemed an attempt to interfere with the ability of new people to form independent judgments about their ashram experiences.

In accordance with ashram routine, all the visitors filed into the large auditorium. As usual, a speech from the guru preceded the dimming of overhead lights for the hour of meditation. I listened closely to every word the guru said. From what I heard people say afterwards, her speech struck many as poetic and paradoxical, with steep darks and gleaming lights that listeners took for literary flourishes.

But I had never heard her give a speech with literary flourishes. Her talks had always been plain, straightforward, and sometimes humorous. I recognized this particular speech as an expression of some kind of obscure personal defeat.

I could hear her! She was saying that she felt trapped.

You need help, I thought.

And no one can help you!

When the lights came on again, I stood up and walked out to wait for the next bus back to Manhattan. Metaphysical monism can’t recognize individual human rights abuses because it lacks the conceptual tools with which to mark out individuals.

What had happened to her? What had pulled her down from the heights she had occupied when I first saw her? Some months later, an article about the ashram appeared in a fashionable magazine. In it, one of her swamis reported having asked her if it was true that she’d slept with her bodyguard. The guru had answered defensively but hadn’t denied it.

Now as it happens, I knew several people who followed gurus or zen masters and admitted to me in passing that their realized teachers were known to grab any female disciple they could get their realized fingers on.

One woman philosopher friend said to me indignantly, about her zen master, “He may be beyond good and evil but they (the female followers) are not!”

Well, just between us kids, nobody is beyond good and evil. I don’t care how many chakras (energy centers) you’ve got spinning.

Be that as it may, it’s clear to me that the male masters can help themselves to treats of the flesh and still keep their standing, status and power. The females (at least in the case I witnessed) cannot.

That is a profound asymmetry

between the sexes

that no metaphysical monism

can put right.

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Character Witnesses

Posted on May 30, 2023 by Abigail

Psyche Entering Cupid’s Garden.
John William Waterhouse 1903.

Last week’s column reported on work being done by archeologists and historians, Christian and Jewish, in Israel and surrounding lands, to uncover the real state of Jewry at the time of Jesus. My hope, in describing some of these findings, had been to advance the cause of Christian/Jewish reconciliation.

How did I think I could do that? By showing that the message of Jesus was not out of synch with advanced Jewish thinking at that time. Also that one key reason for tension between the synagogues in the Roman empire and the Jesus missionaries had to do with concerns that were more practical than theological.

You know,

can’t we all

just get along?

This is not a pipe dream. Believe it or not, I claim to have actually cured two philosophic colleagues (who were, as it happens, my friends) of their routinely casual anti-semitic jokes and remarks. The cure did not come from anything I said. My visible irritation seemed only to amuse them. But something I wrote led them to conclude that they were being stupid. Philosophers hate to be caught being stupid. They just stopped doing what they’d been doing around me. So, in my own personal experience, the oldest-hatred-in-recorded-history is curable!

That said, did my column of last week advance the cause of inter-faith reconciliation? Nah, not even by a millimeter. No doubt I’ve vastly overrated my powers and vastly underestimated the scope – and perhaps the nature – of the problem.

The reactions brought back memories of returning from my first visit to Israel and attempting to tell people about my trip. Had I come back from any other place on the planet, my travelogue would have found listeners. But, of that sole place, NOBODY wanted to hear a single solitary word. Not even my hairdresser!

Had I tried to report, let us say, some unheard of sex practices that I’d stumbled across, people would’ve snickered behind their hands but bent down to hear the forbidden secrets. Only in the Israel case, where I had nothing scandalous to report, did I encounter such strenuously maintained incuriosity. I remember saying at the time that we needed to reconceive the Freudian account of “repression.” There really is such a thing as repression – but it’s not about sex!

Obviously, there was something I hadn’t understood. I’d been naive. Hegel would have understood it better than I did. A culture can be deciphered in terms of whatever, for that culture, constitutes the absolute. A theology is (among other things) a portrait of such an absolute. These definitions and portrayals don’t confine themselves to some rarefied upper tier of the culture visited only by specialists. To remain who they are while taking in new experiences, individuals within any culture are perpetually organizing and reorganizing themselves. That’s what people do. Their processes of personal self-organization are enmeshed with the values of their culture and the story told in the culture to justify those values.

The culture’s justificatory story is not optional. No more than mother’s milk is optional for the new-born. The theological version of the culture’s story can be disbelieved – for example, by the atheist or the wholly secularized person. What it can’t be is ignored.

What actually surprised me was how crucial a part was played in the Christian theological story by a supposed Jewish refusal of Jesus during his lifetime. Here I’m not at all referring to claims about the ontological status of Jesus – whether human, divine, or somehow both. Only about the relations of Jesus with his Jewish contemporaries.

Anyway, the adverse reactions to my well-intentioned efforts left me feeling rather bad. Which is hard to distinguish from the fear that one has been a bad person.

So – to change the entire subject and mindset – I got a Lyft taxi to a riding stable I know that is way above the ordinary run of stables. The horses are Arabians, beautiful and beautifully cared for. Beyond that, the young woman who supports my neurologically-challenged hour in the saddle has an ability to sense what the horse has to tell the rider, and to repeat it in good English to the rider. You can scoff all you want, but I’ve never heard truer insights from any licensed therapist than those I get, more often than not, from the horses I ride there!

There is also a dog named Legacy who belongs to the stable. Don’t ask me why, but Legacy loves me. Nor are his affections indiscriminate or promiscuous. I’m told that one time the stable had hired a man for some repair work who, as the owners learned eventually, was not honest. Strikingly, Legacy had needed no time at all to figure him out, but at once snarled, growled and tried to bite him on the ankle.

Never before had a mid-sized, hairy dog climbed up on my lap and snuggled up to me to be petted – but you can bet I felt highly honored.

After about half an hour on Dusty – the chestnut gelding I rode at a stately walk – was understood to have asked if I liked him! No horse I ever rode in my life took me seriously enough to care in the least whether I liked him.

You can keep your Nobel prizes, your Pulitzers, and your awards for moderating Interfaith Dialogues.

Dusty and Legacy are

what I call

character witnesses.

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Theological Rivalry

Posted on May 23, 2023 by Abigail

The other day, Jerry said to me over brunch, “Why don’t Jews move to claim Jesus as their own?”

I thought about that a minute, then answered, “The evangelicals are the most significant American voting bloc that still supports Israel. It would offend them if Israelis ‘welcomed home’ a Jesus who didn’t come attached to Pauline doctrines.” (I had in mind Original Sin and expiation for that through the crucifixion of Jesus — who is understood as God incarnate. So far, I’ve not seen either of these doctrines even indexed in any Jewishly-authored, authoritative book on Judaism.)

But then I thought, after all, maybe that’s not too daunting an obstacle. Maybe, despite all the unspeakably sad history — the theology of contempt and the politics of persecution — maybe a slow change is under way. Some of it may be occurring on the level of theology, but more probative are the changes taking place on the real ground where “the historical Jesus” — in contrast to “the Christ of faith” — actually lived and died.

Israeli scholars and archeologists are teaming up with their Christian counterparts to unearth the concrete circumstances and controversies of Roman-occupied Judea and of the synagogues in the non-Jewish communities of the surrounding Roman empire. More and more, the blanks are being filled in.

For civilizational self-understanding –

and possible renewal –

this is an exciting time.

Item: were the Jews of that time, who lived outside Judea, narrow-minded, xenophobic and closed in upon themselves, as is sometimes charged? I don’t know Paula Fredriksen’s religious affiliation, but she’s got a Viking name. Her book, When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation tells the different story uncovered by recent archeology. The names of synagogue sponsors, engraved on their ancient walls, included leading non-Jewish officials like mayors and their deputies. Festivals of the Jewish calendar year were observed publicly, with townsfolk and local notables participating.

Not having any doctrine of Original Sin, nor its accompanying doctrine of universal damnation, Jews in non-Jewish communities felt no spiritual obligation to try to convert these “Friends of God,” as they called Gentile sympathizers to Judaism. Many rabbis held that “the righteous among the Gentiles has a share in the world to come.” It was a different story when envoys from the new Jesus movement began to make inroads on that Gentile population. The Jesus people did require total commitment, which included giving up all pagan practices. The effective missionary efforts of the Jesus followers drained synagogues of political backing and financial support. Conflict and mutual recriminations followed predictably.

Item: was Jesus the first to perform miracles? Like Paula Fredriksen, David Flusser – a Jewish Israeli – held a professorship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Right now, I’m reading his book, Jesus. Like Rabbi Irving Greenberg who spoke on the topic in my presence – and like me – Flusser had no difficulty believing that Jesus worked miracles or rose from the dead.

Under the laws of nature such things aren’t possible, you say? How should I know what’s possible under the laws of nature? I haven’t taken the complete inventory of nature’s laws nor do I know whether all of them are physical. If you do, good for you!

Flusser tells that miracle workers were revered as intimates of God – the way the body servant of a king is deemed closer to his lord than even the highest court official. As a miracle worker, Jesus was clearly outstanding, though Flusser names a number of others of the period, who are still remembered for the miracles they did.

In fact, Flusser himself was so obsessed with, and in love with Jesus that (as I was once told by an Israeli colleague) his colleagues at Hebrew University used prankishly to call him on the phone pretending to be Jesus.

Item: was all-inclusive love, as one of God’s requirements, unheard of until introduced by Jesus? Flusser cites a number of contemporary sources that show “the new sensitivity of the Jews in the Greek and Roman period” where “[b]ecause of the difficulty of knowing how far God’s love and mercy extended, many concluded that one ought to show love and mercy to all, both righteous and wicked. In this they would be imitating God himself.” What is unique in Jesus is not the teaching of unbounded love per se, but its intensity — and perhaps its manifest embodiment in that teacher.

Item: did Jews abandon Jesus at the time of his arrest? Was the mob that shouted “crucify him!” representative of Jewish opinion at that moment in time? Or were they a mere motley crew mostly incited by the same priests who had turned him over to the Romans? Flusser points out that, according to gospel accounts, temple guards had been reluctant to arrest Jesus in broad daylight – even though he was overturning currency-exchange tables and openly creating a violent disturbance – because they feared the outnumbering crowds that followed him.

Incidentally, Flusser thinks that the self-serving Judas was unlikely to have hanged himself but that he certainly would have had to leave town in a hurry. (As in, if you’ve turned a Jew over to the Romans, don’t let the sun set on you in Jerusalem.)

For reasons rather too intricate for me to recap here, Flusser finds the account of the crucifixion in Luke’s gospel more likely to be accurate than the ones in the other gospels and Luke (who elsewhere is no friend of the Jews) describes “the sympathy of the Jewish crowd at the crucifixion …” (See Luke 23:26-27.) As for the priests, who condemned Jesus and incited the mob outside Pilate’s headquarters, they belonged to the sect of Sadducees, which denied the afterlife, expected no messiah, were widely disliked as collaborationist and cruel, and did not survive as a Jewish denomination after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E.

What’s the upshot? Here’s how Flusser sums up his findings: “Perhaps tension between Christians and Jews and Jewry was once historically necessary for the development of Christianity as an independent religion. Now the scaffolding can confidently, but unfortunately too late, be removed. … Anti-Judaism stood godfather to the formation of Christianity. We have tried to show this on the basis of one example [the sympathetic Jewish crowds], and through this wanted to do our Christian brothers a good service.”

I couldn’t have said it better.

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Book Matters

Posted on May 16, 2023 by Abigail

“Young Girl Reading”
Seymour Joseph Guy, 1877

Philosopher’s Holiday

by Irwin Edman (Viking 1938, Penguin Books 1943)

This is the sort of book that doesn’t get written these days, brought into being by the sort of man who doesn’t himself get produced any more.

Irwin Edman was a philosopher, essayist, and pretty good poet – with the kind of sensibility that gives itself room enough to stretch to the limit of its power to feel and observe. He taught philosophy at Columbia University, being of the generation old enough to have been teaching when my father (class of 1925) was an undergraduate there. In fact, his reminiscences include a passing reference to a student who could only have been my father: “the withering cynic of his class, whose god was [Jonathan] Swift” and who, despite all that, surprisingly became “a mystical and fanatical rabbi.”

I very much doubt my father would have endorsed that portrait. He always grinned, as if at something irresistibly comical, whenever the name of Irwin Edman came up.

The author’s reminiscences include a brief glimpse of New York City (my home town) in the years 1900 – 1910, when he was a boy. He “grew up … in simple gemutlich Manhattan, through which one could cheerfully ride a bicycle from the farms in outlying Harlem to Forty Second Street and Fifth Avenue … that friendly simple town … full of brownstone houses … and German beer gardens … open-air trolleys that took on exciting adventures … of the neighbors … shouting ‘Get a horse’ to goggled automobilists” and so on and on into the fabled past. One time, he records being stopped by a “ragamuffin about my own age” who demanded that he “Gimme all you got.” Our author was about to deliver his entire fortune, which came to twenty-five cents in coin, when “with some singular surge of moral scruple,” he asked the young tough, “’what do you want to do with it?’” When he was told that it would go to buy cigarettes, young Edman urged his assailant not to spend it that way. “They’re coffin nails,’ I said; ‘they’re bad for you, and you’ll die early. You really oughtn’t to smoke, you know.’” At that, the would-be junior mugger returned it all — the watch, the fountain pen and the twenty-five cents — and thereafter told his buddies in crime to leave young Edman alone. Our professor of philosophy comments with wry realism: “It’s the only moral conquest I can remember making.”

We get a picture of the Columbia College of Edman’s student days. His teachers included Frederick J. E. Woodbridge who “educated a whole generation of students in philosophy … [including] Morris Cohen and Sidney Hook and J. H. Randall, Jr. and Herbert Schneider.” I asked Jerry about Woodbridge. He was, Jerry said, a naturalist of the common sense variety, not the “throw the furniture overboard to lighten the ship” kind of naturalist. He had no hesitation in quoting poetry, great literature or scripture. He revived interest in Aristotle, who had long been dismissed as of antiquarian interest only. He founded the Journal of Philosophy, one of the premier philosophical journals. He didn’t require that an object be put to a practical test, or set one to problem-solving, in order to be worth attending to. His was a summons to intellectual vision.

Woodbridge and John Dewey were the most influential and honored teachers of their time, which extended from the beginning of the twentieth century into its first three or four decades. As Dewey’s student, Edman underwent a kind of about face. Dewey lectured without eloquence, “very slowly in a Vermont drawl … and … hardly seemed aware of the presence of a class.” It was only when Edman looked over his notes after class that he discovered, “what had seemed so casual, so rambling, so unexciting, was of an extraordinary coherence, texture, and brilliance. … Not every day or in every teacher does one overhear the palpable processes of thought.”

Aside from its portraits of a vanished New York, his teachers and later students, the chapters also range and rove over the experiences of an attentive and thoughtful traveler in the time between the two world wars. The book’s original publication date was 1938. “We came to look … even on the living world of Europe with something of the aesthetic traveler’s eyes with which we viewed its past. We gathered vaguely from the newspapers on the Continent that there were ominous matters afoot … armies of occupation and starved populations … [but] somehow, to one bemused young American at least, these things at the time seemed more unreal than the beautiful surface of the past by which one’s eyes and imagination were enriched.”

Though the author cautions against using these surfaces of the past – or for that matter, the tokens of an imagined utopian future – for escapist purposes, even so, at the end he rather celebrates the refreshment afforded by what he is not ashamed to call “the Ivory Tower.” By that he means the inner refuge where, if only for a season, one may “love art in the sense of loving life where it is at once rich and clear” and where “one must retreat to the Ivory Tower for refreshment or for understanding” or “perhaps deserting the realm of philosophy for that of poetry, and exact analysis for the pleasures of a waking dream.”

What shall I say in conclusion about this intelligently detached revisiting of what is now a bygone era? The author has shown personal toughness sufficient to protect his own rather delicate and wide-ranging sensibility.

I respect that.

Posted in book reviews, books | Tagged Irwin Edman's Philosopher's Holiday | Leave a comment

My Body in the Culture Wars

Posted on May 9, 2023 by Abigail

Susanna and the Elders by Rembrandt ca. 1650.

Hegel would say that culture wars occur where there are opposing claims to define the culture – have the final say, the last word – decide what determines “the absolute” for that culture. Depending on where you find yourself on such battlefields, you’ll regard your body’s possibilities differently.

Suppose, for example, you found yourself in a verbal combat with Donald Trump. Imagining yourself to be in an ordinary debate, you might hope to catch Trump asserting and denying the same thing (contradicting himself) or overlooking some fact that would refute one of his sweeping generalizations. Meanwhile, while you were thinking of moves in a normal argument, he would be ridiculing your height, your energy level, or – if you’re a woman – the chance that you’d be menstruating or not sufficiently attractive to be worth raping.

Anyone old enough to be reading this column has been carefully taught not to speak that way to anyone! If my inner child ever said such insulting words – even silently – she sure is out of practice by now.

It’s not that one’s frozen stupefaction can’t thaw in time to find some riposte. It’s that, to do so effectively, one must first realize that

this combat isn’t verbal.

To begin with, try to intuit what any animal would sense instantly: where is my body? where is his body? what does my body know about the space he is filling? where are the holes in that space? what is the filled-in part of the space-of-his-body doing? suggesting? or about to do? Don’t cringe. Don’t cower. Don’t freeze. If you do, he’ll think he won. And he’ll be right.

Let’s move along to a higher level and a different kind of confrontation. Today I read an article titled “Vulnerability in America” by Jennie Lightweis-Goff. In the opening sentence, the writer informs her readers that her yoga teacher beheaded his girlfriend. I’ll omit the additional details. Most of the essay goes on to discuss how such crimes get rated from the point of view of the publicity and public interest that they draw. White victims score higher than victims of color, while black on black crimes get the lowest attention scores. When that phenomenon first came to light, it drew disapproval from the very media that was in the business of generating high viewer scores. The writer speculates that another factor likely augments media attention and viewer interest: public depravity. She also supposes that the publicity afforded such crimes has served to discourage women from asserting their recently-won legal rights to participate in the life — work and recreation — of society.

Along the way, we learn that the writer has had relationships with men that included some element of risk. At the end of the essay, we learn that the writer now teaches in a prison and cycles alone at night. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

The lesson I draw from this hodge podge of an essay is that, as W. B. Yeats says,

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

What convictions do I find lacking in “Vulnerability in America”? First, the conviction that murder is evil. It’s a point she raises only to disavow the term “evil.” Contra Lightweis-Goff, the act of murder is not “structural.” It’s not traceable to an indefinitely long chain of causes. It ought not to be done. The heart of the murderer ought to prohibit the murder. In the case that opens her essay, there are compounding factors that aggravate the evil. First, he murdered a woman who was close to him, which betrayed her trust and their intimacy. Second, the skill of a yoga teacher involves harmonizing the relations between mind and body. This murderer betrayed what appears to have been the very calling of his life. To fail to underscore these points and instead lead us through a phenomenology of depravity with pretend neutrality is to confuse the reader.

The body language of confusion invites predators.

A book I just finished reading, While Time Remains by Yeonmi Park deals with other pitfalls on the champ de bataille of the culture wars. The author escaped from North Korea, which suffers under what is surely one of the worst regimes on our planet. She made her way through perils and brutal degradations almost beyond telling (though the journey is described in her previous book), and now lives as an American citizen. Her English is impeccable, her intelligence not easily befuddled and she strikes me as unusually observant and capable. She sees the country with fresh eyes and this makes her an interesting guide.

She gets to the point of enrolling in Columbia College as a freshman, where she will take the required courses of the college’s core liberal arts program. “In the four years I ended up spending at Columbia, professors in the humanities frequently challenged us to demonstrate how woke we were. … Worse than a bad grade was to be labeled by one’s classmates a ‘SIX HIRB’: a sexist, intolerant xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist bigot.” To say the least, this was disappointing, since she’d already spent her early years in North Korean classrooms showing how facilely she could echo the propaganda of her teachers in that tyrannical regime. To have to respond to analogous pressures here was as morally painful to endure as it was mentally easy to do.

(Though no comparable political pressures were applied in my grad school days at Columbia, I do remember taking Grad Record Exams in philosophy – either while or just before I enrolled there – and passing them with grades so high they were off-the-chart. How did I do that? Easy. The answers to the questions were multiple choice and they all looked wrong to me. I checked the front cover to see who wrote the exams in philosophy. Recognizing the names and the philosophical preferences attached to those names, I gave only the wrong answers preferred by those professors.)

What do you want me to have done? Give the wrong answers they didn’t prefer? Get up and walk out?

Back to our remaining question: what is going on, body-wise and mind-wise, when a dissenter draws the notice of a mob? Well, it’s very much harder to disarm a hostile crowd than to do that with a single individual who refuses to argue fairly. Though I’ve seen it described and even watched it on video – brought about on a small scale by individuals who were visibly fearless – in most cases it’s not like confronting a single adversary with a body that belongs to him alone, which might be scanned. It’s not one girl looking at a few hornets. It’s a swarm.

Here’s what I think: you keep your head down and just keep on keeping on. But for God’s sake — and above all —

DON’T APOLOGIZE!

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