Some years ago, I had a dream that appeared to be a scene from a past life. I am not claiming it was that, only that it seemed so to me, the dreamer. It took place in Nazi Germany before the death camps had been made operational. At first, Nazis had to make do with herding Jews into vans that were then sealed and filled with carbon monoxide. In my dream, that’s how I was murdered. What I remember most vividly from the dream was what I saw as I was exiting my body. The question on my mind was, How extensive is this murder program? Since I rose high enough to see the curvature of the earth, I could also perceive that it was very extensive: global in fact. In my dream I resolved that I would come back and fight it.
Anyone who wanted to do just that could have no better model than Douglas Murray. He’s a journalist, columnist and author of eight books, at least three of which have to do with the strange, sleepwalking refusal of Western civilization to rise to its own defense. This failure is found in the face of overt, multiple, clear and articulate threats to its continued survival.
Murray happened to be in New York on October 7, 2023, when the attacks on Israeli kibbutzim and the Nova music festival occurred. By the next day, while Israel Defense Force soldiers were still looking for body parts of victims, crowds gathered in Times Square, and in cities across Western Europe and Britain, Canada and Australia, to cheer and celebrate the tortures, rapes, kidnappings and massacres, Murray decided his place as journalist must be in Israel. His book is largely a report on what unimaginable scenes met him there, though relevant historical background plus interviews with lead actors are included as well.
Aside from the horror of the scenes Murray saw, which he describes as fully as he needs to, his important take-away has to do with motivation. The failures of intelligence on the Israeli side had to do with misreading motivations. As Murray tells it, “the security consensus in Israel had for many years been unified around what became known as the ‘conception.’ … By the time of the October 7 attacks it had been estimated that the group’s leadership alone had accumulated personal wealth of about 11 billion. … Crucially there was a belief that the leaders would not be willing to do anything that might jeopardize the luxury lifestyles they and their families enjoyed (pp. 49f).”
This understandable belief, in what we might term Hamas’s motivational normality, turned out way wide of the mark. Death (inflicted or suffered) in the service of jihad is the ground-level jihadi motive. It explains unprecedented facts like these: “In the 140 square miles of Gaza, Hamas spent its years in power constructing over 350 miles of tunnels, with about 6,000 different tunnel entrances. Many of these were hidden in civilian houses, mosques, hospitals and other nonmilitary buildings … a breach of the Geneva Conventions … . Where most countries would seek to protect its civilians, Hamas always had a stated aim of using them as human shields (pp. 126f).” They put weapons under a baby’s crib, a fighter under an old lady’s wheelchair with the old lady still in it … the list of unimaginable incidents goes on and there are more than can be fitted into a review of this size. Death is no obstacle. Death is prized.
What about the widely touted claims of Israeli “genocide” in Gaza? Murray compares the recent British and American military operative ratio of three to four civilians killed for each enemy combatant. “Until the Gaza war this was regarded as a low level of civilian casualties in a heavily built-up conflict zone.” By contrast, even taking Hamas estimates at face value, “at the very least this would mean a civilian-to-terrorist death toll of one-to-one (pp. 132f).”
So what are we to make of all this? What do I make of it? To tell the truth, it has upset most of the assumptions I have made – throughout most of my life – about the human norm. About what’s ordinary, what’s normal and what background assumptions one can make about strangers, particularly if the strangers are of student age.
Ann Frank wrote in her diary, that “in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.” I don’t know if I believe that or ever asked myself what I believe about people in general and how they are “at heart.” But I do believe that –
Photo courtesy of the estate of Michael Wyschogrod. Depicts a meeting with Pope John Paul II. Used for educational purposes.
For my Christian friends, today is the day Jesus rose from the dead.
O the stone was rolled away
he’s no longer where he lay.
Or so goes the country hymn. Did Jesus rise from the dead? Even analytic philosophers would concede that the question is meaningful, since — had one been in the vicinity of the tomb on the third day following the crucifixion — one might have seen Jesus if indeed he had risen.
One of the privileges of my former life in Manhattan was the many years of friendship I enjoyed with philosopher/theologian Michael Wyschogrod and his distinguished wife Edith. During some part of those years, Michael had formed what he titled a “Rainbow Group.” This was an interfaith gathering of religionists who met about once a month to consider questions at the cutting edge of the theological differences between Christians and Jews.
In a different setting, captured in the photo above, Michael was also active in negotiating with the Vatican and Presbyterians to modify or remove anti-Jewish doctrines.
The Rainbow Group was doing something rather different. It had the astringency and sense of risk that’s a recognizable feature of the serious search for truth. Each of us may have different notions of what constitutes high drama. For me, Michael Wyschogrod’s Rainbow Group collected together all the basic elements of high drama. It was where people personally and professionally committed to particular faith-systems — particular views of the Absolute — met and put their founding beliefs on the line for reciprocal challenging!
It was there that the eminent Jewish scholar Irving Greenberg first tried out his hypothesis that Jesus, after his crucifixion, actually had risen from the dead in accordance with Christian belief. It was not that Jews had misrepresented the resurrection experience. They had not experienced it. But not from any narrow-mindedness nor from self-deception. They had not experienced it because God hid it from them, or at least hid it from their major opinion-shapers.
Why would God do that? Because, Greenberg hypothesized, the Creator wanted both religions: the Christian one slanted upward with its vertical or transcendent emphasis; the Jewish one with its horizontal slant toward common life and its shared realities. Both are necessary, Greenberg suggested. Since it’s hard to do both at the same time, each was assigned a different specialization, the vertical or the horizontal, inside which to sustain its natural and proper relation to the divine.
From what I heard later, Greenberg subsequently modified his talk, but it was very striking to hear it fresh, possibly for the first time, before the sharp edges got rounded off. People live and die by what they believe and disbelieve about God. So is Christ risen?
The American contribution to rolling back the Nazi conquest of Europe and defeating Hitler’s regime was ornamented by the cartoons of Bill Mauldin, which first appeared in Stars and Stripes, the soldiers’ paper. I own a collection of those cartoons and, from Bill Mauldin’s introduction, learned of the exclusive club to which his dirt-encrusted heroes, Willy and Joe, belonged:
the fellowship of them
wot has been shot at.
If I were still on campus, practicing my profession of teaching philosophy, there is no doubt in my mind that I would be out there fighting the horrible outbreak of anti-semitism at our colleges and universities.
But aren’t the campus-out-breakers legitimately concerned (I may be asked) about the damage inflicted on Gaza’s civilian population by Israeli military actions in Gaza? Wouldn’t that naturalconcern have been the prompt for re-normalizing the oldest continuous hatred in recorded history?
First, hatred brimming over into gleeful malice isn’t normal. Second, a little history helps, I think. When Israel withdrew from its occupation of Gaza (having only occupied it to ward off jihadi attacks from its neighbor) it left behind for potential use its small manufactories and farms. The natural hope was for a regime of good neighborliness in Gaza.
Too bad for that natural hope. Within a year, Gazans had voted Hamas into power. The founding charter of Hamas actually called for the murder of every Jew on planet earth. Hamas took the international contributions, which had flowed into Gaza following the IDF withdrawal, and used them to build 300 or so miles of underground tunnels from which to launch murderous attacks on its Israeli neighbors – attacks which culminated in the grisly torture murders of October 7, 2023. The October 7 crimes against humanity have been compared to the Nazi Holocaust in which six million Jews were murdered. Of course, as crimes they were far less extensive; but in deliberately publicized sadistic relish, they were morally comparable.
These horrors were actually cheered and celebrated by those whose images of victim and victimizer derive – not from facts on the ground – but from a script whose actors (exploiters from the hegemonic Western countries v. the exploited from non-Western countries) are assigned their fixed labels in advance, without reference to what was actually done, and when it was done, or by whom, or from what motive. As to the longer history of the players, that’s not part of the artificially shortened script.
Prominent among the script-clippers are young men and women presently at American institutions of higher education. They are the demonstrators at whom I’ve been simply staring. Are these the young people to whom I’ve devoted the work of my life as a college professor?
Jerry, also a former philosophy professor and chair of a well-regarded philosophy department, reminds me that I didn’t devote myself to philosophy students per se. I devoted my working forces to speaking, writing and acting truthfully. As for the students, they could take it or leave it.
Some took it.
Some left it.
Plato’s Academy was not built for students. It was built to protect and facilitate the search for truth. In that sense (and I can give you particulars) I’ve never retired.
Presently, with more than ordinary effort, I am recovering from an attack of temporary memory loss – in delayed reaction to a combat that personally I wasn’t in. Among the young and educated elite, it is now okay – more than okay, good for sex appeal – to isolate and despise Jewish fellow students and professors. From Berkeley to Columbia, it’s now okay to celebrate Hamas’s atrocities of October 7, 2023. I’ve been in lots of combats but they never resulted in a symptom such as memory loss – the kind one associates with shell shock.
The first combat I was in was fought when I was six years of age. There was a family that lived in the house on the hill. My mother called them “Jewish hillbillies.” Theirs was the most remote of the rental properties in Camp Hilltop, where we (my family) spent our summers. Hilltop was run by an earthy, raspy-voiced theosophist. Her late husband had been one too but had starved to death accidentally while on a long fast.
Anyway, one afternoon all the kids were seated together on the steps of one of the bungalows when the younger of the sons from the remote cabin on the hill appeared with a hammer and began hammering on the sandaled toes of the kids. The big kids as well as the little kids, going row by row. Nobody stopped him! Though he was littler than anybody, he was also badder – and that’ll get you a certain degree of respect.
When he got to me with his hammer, I stood up, saying, “This time, Jan, you’ve gone far enough!” Or, “you’ve gone too far!” I don’t remember my exact words. But I do know that we were soon going at it with our fists, standing on the ground.
It hurt. Fighting hurt, and I did not like it at all, but with kids circled around us saying, “Keep going Abby, don’t run away!” what could I do?
So I kept at it as my audience required till Jan ran away first, crying. I was accompanied, escorted really, to our bungalow across the gravel road by big kids shouting, “Abby beat up Jan!”
I guess it was a proud moment. I’m not sure. But it probably set the tone for many combats that followed in adult life – a list of which could conceivably impress my readers. I don’t know. Thoughtful readers are hard to impress. So I won’t try.
But instead will fast forward to the present era, when universities like Columbia, where I have some of my degrees, are still cheering for a Hamas expedition of October 7, 2023, which saw babies torn from their mothers’ wombs and put in ovens, and whole families tied up together and burned alive.
Athens and Jerusalem: the two essential foundations of our civilization. From Athens, we have the Academy, the House that Plato built, where truth is sought without fear or favor; from Jerusalem, we have Biblical history, the history-to-be-remembered of which God is the Witness, the Jewish record of experience on the timeline, illuminated without fear or favor.
Today Dr. Jerry L. Martin and Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal (author of Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column) pursue their discussion of Beginningwise, which is Part One of her new book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher. Let’s see how their discussion goes forward.
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Confessions of a Young Philosopher illustration
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Jerry: You’re against getting out of what you call the female predicament. It’s full of vulnerabilities, of this erotic vulnerability. Not just you can be beat up in the alley, but this erotic vulnerability. And you conclude that chapter with the following statement: “The big question was how to endow our feminine existence with ineradicable value and how to endow our values with feminine existence.”
Abigail: Yes, I saw the two things in tension. There were philosophic and perhaps even religious traditions that educated young people, young women, inherited. By the time we graduated from college, we had learned not to put the romantic kind of feminine existence in the same roster with values. Values were either impersonal and neutered or masculine. It seemed to me that one had some kind of quest – there was a dynamic inherent in the search for high purpose, high values – and it did not fit with the requirement that nobody could dodge honestly, to realize one’s femininity. The culture at that time gave women a few years in which to accomplish the second. And of course eternity to accomplish the first. That seemed to me to be quite a predicament. And therefore it seemed urgent, to find some way to merge eternal values and the very contingent, fragile, destructible value of femininity.
Jerry: Well, at first you’re just observing this in this highly eroticized city that Paris certainly was, and trying to figure it out. What’s going on here? And then you meet a young man. He’s Greek, Greco-French, a student of philosophy, studying in Paris, and you run into him in front of a student restaurant, and you start walking with him. It turns out he’s a communist, and communist is a big thing in French politics, especially in Paris at the time. And so you argue about those things a lot, as well as about other things. You have a lot of arguments. Two philosophers are like that, even two very young philosophers.
And at one point he says – Pheidias is the name you give him in the book, you change the names to protect the innocent and the guilty – he says, “‘We’ve talked too much of politics and not enough of love,’ he said reflectively in the warm lamplight.” (Good move Pheidias.) “Now he moved forward soundlessly, and we kissed.”
And this is your first real kiss ever. And the next thing that happens, which even in our swift-moving American life of today I found shocking, you kiss, and right after the kiss, he “moved furtively, with a hand swift as an otter, rolling it under my skirt.” Who does that? Well, he obviously knew how to do this, because it was a move, automatic to him and orchestrated with lightning speed. And you respond “‘No! Wait a minute!’ I muttered rapidly in English… .”
And after a little back and forth, he says, “You’re not going to tell me you’re a virgin?” You know, well of course I’m a virgin! you say. And then you have a little argument about virgins and virginity and your condition. And you say, “I was pretending to him, and to myself, that we were discussing a commodity, when what was really under discussion was the future course of my life.
“He shook his head impatiently, as if abruptly roused from some utter unreality, and his hands went back to their previous place. …We were now, as it suddenly seemed, engaged in a physical struggle. If things once take that turn, a woman has lost ground that is tactically crucial.”
Let me go on. I mean, that scene is so striking, but there’s an ideational backdrop to all of this. Pheidias goes on. He’s so good at this stuff, I’m always struck with shock and half admiration. Should give lessons. “‘It’s not wrong, it’s not wrong, there is nothing wrong about it,’ he went on simply, rhythmically, crooningly, shaking his head, looking at me.”
“Or, if it was,” you comment in your text, “you couldn’t prove it by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Darwin, Freud, and Marx. What it felt like was cold, extremely smooth and oddly impersonal.”
And those figures are part of the contending worldviews. It’s not just contending cultures. It’s a highly eroticized culture. Americans, we often say, are still too pragmatic for that. But it’s these worldviews where this hyper-charged and hyper-aggressive eroticism, is also kind of materialist. He’s a communist, these thinkers are all kind of materialist, reductionist of one kind or another. It’s all nothing but x, period. That’s all there is, and that’s all you are, therefore. Would that be a fair statement?
Abigail: Yes, that’s what was so deeply shocking to me. I grasped the fact that, if you repaint the world so that those are its outer boundaries, and its internal contours, you can’t make a case for such an ideal state of things as innocence.
Jerry: Yes. And in fact you say a little later, “Here I was going through something for the first time, and he was acting as if it was a shopworn thing.”
Abigail: Yes.
Jerry: He does manage to get you in his room and in his bed, and in ways that you barely notice. He is so smooth. One piece of clothing after another disappears and you’re in his bed naked, and “[h]is face smoothed in what looked like a religious emotion” as he looks at you. He had said, you’re so beautiful, something like that, and then shakes his head with “utter conviction, as if I were the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.” Like the beatific vision. “Undeniably, I was beginning to feel a little happier in the nude. The existential question, ‘What is my body for others?’ was receiving a pleasant answer.”
So, what a question! I guess it wouldn’t have occurred to me, but maybe every female reader or listener would say ‘Yes!’ That’s a big question. ‘What, as a physical being, are others going to make of me exhibited, unshorn?’
Abigail: Yes, this many-stage defloration is of course a crucial rung of the down-going ladder. Because, as soon as the favorable answer to the question, What is my body for others? has been delivered, I’m not the same girl. I know this should have happened with the right man. I have a 1950’s sense of, you’re not supposed to have this experience more than once. And so I have a sense of some kind of, I don’t know if this is too strong a word, existential terror. They don’t usually paste that vocabulary on these very private we-keep-these-to-ourselves experiences of women. But they do comport existential terror because of what gives value to a woman. Her youth, you know her untouched character, her you are the first, her ability to convey that, and that was of course very strongly etched in the social life of that era.
But I understood that, in one way, I’m being celebrated up to the skies – just as might be the ambition of any woman – the erotic ambition. Okay, Michelangelo’s ceiling’s got nothing on me. On another level, the merger of that validation with the right moral, social, future-bearing supports has dropped out. And so I’m both fulfilled in a way, a realized big success as a woman in one sense of that word. However, in another way of looking at it, from another vantage point, terrifyingly abandoned! In a condition verging on that of one bereft of hope. Something I hoped for is gone and cannot come back.
Jerry: You write as if you’re already no longer a virgin, even though you know that no official sex act has taken place. And certainly, my sense, and I don’t know if it goes right up to the present, I certainly have read accounts of contemporary women hoping or often wishing that their first night had been with the right person and especially had been the right kind of experience. You know the right surround, the right moment, the right sense to what this transaction was about.
Abigail: Yes, the vulnerability of women that they expose and give away requires, in terms of the emotional logic of that situation, a receiver, a recipient who will protect them, who will support them, who will ensure that the surrender of that moment has a long future. And so you can’t get that back.
And the banalization of sexual initiation today seems to me – I don’t want to seem to be talking moralistically or in terms of bygone banalities and cliches that everybody seems to have outgrown – but the culture is not noticing the dynamic of a woman. It’s not honoring that. One might hope that perhaps the future will disclose some way of honoring it that doesn’t put women in girdles and nylons, and the other constraints, or tell them if you’re not married by the age of 23, you’re on the dust heap of history. I mean, there were these downsides to the great value placed on virginity as innocence back in those times. But there was something correct about it that I think is still alive in the experience of women.
And there’s a new kind of puritanism that doesn’t despise a woman who has lost her innocence. It doesn’t treat her as ruined goods. But it’s a puritanism that despises her innocence, and so says about this despising – which is a kind of ruination taken for granted if that’s not too much of a hyperbole, if that’s not an exaggeration – says about it, oh, that doesn’t matter; don’t worry kid, that’s not poetry, that’s prose.
I can sort of feel a stifled sob in the feminine breast in the face of that kind of repression, the repression that denies the rights of inhibition, that says you can’t have your inhibitions, which are nature’s protection. After all, before the age of contraception, we’re talking I don’t know a million years, however long we’ve taken to evolve, but for the last say million years, intercourse meant pregnancy. So the repression is not simply some late-grown artificiality. It’s built into the nature of protection for infants, protection for mothers, protection that’s biologically required.
So these so-called repressions are not superficial or merely outdated social styles. They have a deep, ingrained hold on our natures. We know them, without it being good form any more to talk about them. That doesn’t mean these realities have vanished.
Today Dr. Jerry L. Martin and Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal (author of Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column) begin their discussion of Beginningwise, which is Part One of her new book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher. Let’s see how their discussion goes forward.
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Confessions of a Young Philosopher illustration from Part One
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Jerry: . . . yes, you look good.
Abigail: We try, we try harder.
Jerry: You try and you come through. You succeed! Yes, trying is important, succeeding is nice too.
Abigail: Thank you.
Jerry: Well, I’ve been rereading Confessions of a Young Philosopher, which is always for me a page-turner. As I go through paragraph by paragraph, I have many questions. We don’t have endless time, so I boil them down to, I don’t know, six or eight or ten. We start with you and a group of grad students, who all got Fullbright grants to come to Paris for a year.
Well, Paris is a complete culture shock. Totally different from the America you grew up in at the time of the 1950s–this was the buttoned-down generation of the late 1950s–and Paris is not buttoned-down. And you’re just trying to figure out what you are seeing.
You write, “In the metro, along the Seine’s banks, the river banks, in the crowded alleys of the Latin Quarter, lovers walked. I did not know what they were. I’d never seen anything remotely like them.” Because, in America, people who were “romantically involved” didn’t walk in this way. You describe it as almost a smooth, interlocking flow. And you comment, “Unlike America, on the social map, time and space for this had been cleared. What ideas were being acted out here? What I then surmised, and I am not now possessed of better information, was that the quintessential French story on the subject of romantic love was Tristan and Iseult.” And maybe you could just say something about that. Of course, you say it in the book, but it can frame our discussion on Part One (Beginningwise).
Abigail: It’s a medieval tale, probably existing in many variants, whose scene-setting features are that Iseult is destined as a bride for the king. And Tristan, as a faithful knight of the king, has gone to fetch her from the kingdom where she now lives and is a princess. On the voyage taking them back to King Mark’s domain, they both unwittingly drink a liquid meant to support the royal marriage by rendering the drinkers hopelessly in love. Instead it hits both of them, and they fall hopelessly and unlawfully into what is called the coup de foudre, which is romantic love visualized as a stroke of lightning. And of course it has no place in the social and political world that each belongs to. So it’s immediately an outlaw experience and eventually both die of it because they can’t live it in the real world. And that, I have been authoritatively told by a Swiss-French philosopher, is the essential French love story.
Jerry: But you say here a social space had been set aside, you might say, basically for this type of romantic love. And a lot of your experience will be about its allure and limitations.
Abigail: The modern version, the updated Tristan and Iseult, emphasized the erotic more than the supernatural character of this kind of gnostic love and it did clear a space and a time. But it was a limited space and time. Instead of conveniently dying, as the lovers did in the medieval prototype, they fall out of love. So it’s got a temporal boundary as well as probably a spatial boundary. You’d best do that in the Latin Quarter.
Jerry: Yes, so in some way it’s fleeting.
Abigail: It’s transitory.
Jerry: A few pages later you raise this question. You’re trying to figure out your place as a woman, both an intellectual and, you might say, foremost as a woman–it’s hard to say which is more important, but anyway, certainly, certainly as a woman–and you raise this difficult question: “Is a woman who is not and has never been considered desirable as a woman, just as much a woman as if she had been desired?” And then you say well, yes, motherhood, you know something like that, but it remains a question for you. Explain, what is the role of desire in being a woman? In being anybody maybe, in being a person?
Abigail: It’s not conceded today. Feminism has blunted these outlines. But pre-feminist young womanhood was very well aware of what may be a perennial fact: that a woman is vulnerable. Not just vulnerable to rape, to pregnancy and so forth, but vulnerable to the danger of not being desired. And that seems to go, at least in pre-feminist America, it was not discussed, but it was widely acknowledged in all kinds of ways, small and large.
Your feminine dignity was at stake! Your feminine authenticity, your feminine, well, I guess people would have said success, or at least the French spoke of le succès. As you know, just as a man was to make money and be important and powerful, a woman was to be desired. And somehow, I mean think of the physical correlate of desire–the woman awaiting the man’s entry and she can’t enter herself, you know, there are things you just can’t do to yourself, and I don’t care how many how-to books people write and publish–it’s not the same. And it’s not the same not just in terms of the boundaries of the sensation. It’s not the same, and this was widely, almost universally acknowledged in my young days, it’s not the same socially. It’s not the same in terms of some deeper sense of success that didn’t have to do with whether or not you won the Nobel Prize. It simply had to do with, I guess we would have said, being a “fulfilled” woman.
That kind of language was not frowned upon. It wasn’t used much, but that was out of fear–the fear that one wouldn’t be a fulfilled woman. We didn’t talk about it, but conversation circled around that danger. One was endangered. Vulnerable and endangered. In spite of all the free and easy style of the American girl, very different from the French, you know, crimped up and cosmetically at the ready and languorously enraptured. That girl, we weren’t, but we were as vulnerable as that girl.
Jerry: You go on, on the very next page, and I’ll put together several excerpts here. “It seemed to me then that one rose above this female predicament at one’s peril, because such an effort to somersault out of one’s chronological place and one’s skin could leave one shorn of the erotic value that alone allowed one to escape being found ridiculous. But why wasn’t rising above it an option,” you ask. Because this was what life was actually like at that point in time, which means, in history. And going down a little: “History, in my eyes, was not just a veil of exile from prelapsarian grace. On the contrary, it was the right place to be, the best place for God and me to hold our argument.” Because for you, God is always a kind of omnipresent Witness. As you put it, God is an ongoing Witness.
And what about the life of the mind, you wonder? Here you are, an intellectual, going to be a philosopher. “What about the life of the mind?” you ask. “Aren’t the ideas, as Plato said, eternal? Although I loved the life of the mind, it was not for me a self-sufficient narrative. What I was interested in primarily was the truth about life, not the exercise of the mental faculties. For me, the truth about life was to be worked out between human beings and the historical God in settings that were real and concrete, not imaginary.”
So that’s quite a set of reflections and you know it’s often talked about as if people have various self-help approaches today. Some are kind of Eastern, you can step out of it, the power of now, you invent yourself. You know, you can leap above it, and then you won’t see those things happening and then, I guess with enough self-help or other help, they will seem, what, imaginary?
Abigail: They seem compensatory. They have around them, as a sort of enveloping parenthesis, Plan B. And okay, you can go to Plan B as if it were the only plan, but only after you know for a fact that Plan A isn’t ever going to be yours. But to pretend that these compensatory stratagems that replace, for a woman, romantic success, are as good as or better than, or put you at a higher plateau–from which elevated place you can look down on the mad circus of life–all that strikes me as very disguised and very distinguished sour grapes. You know, I just … I knew what kinds of somersaults, internal somersaults, you had to do to arrive there, and I was very busy, trying to be transparent and simple and available to myself, to the world I would encounter and to the Witness that, without talking about it much, I implicitly assumed was watching. Witness meaning, if you will, if you don’t like theism, truth. Truth was watching.
Jerry: And it’s truth in real life, I take it.
Abigail: Yes, and you know, there are all kinds of wonderful cultures that practice tea ceremonies and practice hatha yoga and practice meditation that leads to bliss, and God bless them all. I didn’t know as much about them as perhaps I know now, but that wasn’t the script I was in. I was in the Jewish script. I was in history. Maybe you want to be someplace else, but I had inherited a sense of history. I had inherited a sense that we live lives that are consequential, in chronological time. And so, in chronological time, there occur tragedies, realizations, romantic absolutes.
For example, I think, in the Jewish imagination, Jacob and Rachel are a kind of absolute. Jacob had maybe four wives, four women with whom he had progeny, but the prophet says Rachel is weeping for her children. The Jewish imagination cleaves to the beloved wife and that means, it knows there is such a thing, even in plural marriage. Of course there are these ugly rivalries between the wives, which eventually, I think in the 10th century, led the rabbis to abolish polygamy. But taking out that superannuated feature of the Biblical stories, what people understand from those stories is that there is a competition involved in love.
Jewish boy with hands raised during the Warsaw Ghetto liquidation, 1943. Photograph from Jürgen Stroop’s report to Heinrich Himmler.
“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 Iwas 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 –
Confessions of a Young Philosopher illustration from the cover
Today Dr. Jerry L. Martin and Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal (author of Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column) complete their discussion of the Preface to her new book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher. Let’s see how their discussion winds up.
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Jerry: In the Preface, you raise the question: Did I think there was a God? “Certainly, I was no atheist. For me, God was at least”—and you capitalize them—”Witness and Backup for a hopeful approach to experience that allowed one to look events and feelings in the face without trying to make them other than they were.”
Now, that’s very striking because one often wants to look at things with rose-colored glasses, or to imbue them with ethereal meanings that aren’t evident. But you seem to say you want God as a witness to what? To a hopeful approach to experience that nevertheless looks at things as they are.
Abigail: You know, as we go back over the Preface, certain things come to the foreground for me that I hadn’t quite focused on before. And there seems to be a lot of God-relation in this early setting out. The point of true love: don’t try to get in connection with God, into some meaningful, purposeful connection with God, if you’ve left your own happiness behind. Because God is not fooled by your fakery, by your hypocrisy.
God seems to have a bias for truthfulness. It seems that all these purposes I’m describing are, in a way, shot through with an awareness of God as my Witness. It’s not that I’m looking for a mystical experience. Every once in a while, I’d read some book about or by some mystic, and I’d try to crank myself up to have a wonderful time with God. It would not happen, so I would give it up. All right, nice try, but that wasn’t perhaps the most serious motivating engine in my life.
This purposiveness has to do with getting aligned. There’s some kind of sense of alignment. You don’t want to be out of alignment with regard to your erotic ambitions. You don’t want to repress them, suppress them, or call them something else. If you take your romantic ambitions, your erotic ambitions, to be on a higher plane, then why suppress them? And by the same token, you don’t want to be out of alignment with regard to the God who sees you. Which means you don’t want to be in bad faith, you don’t want to pretend to be something that you ain’t. God is going to know.
God is not fooled. Everybody else could be fooled, but in that respect—just as you can’t fool a child by pretending to be benevolent and love the cute little number when you don’t—the child is not fooled. The dog is not fooled. You know, there are humble creatures in life who are simply not fooled by grown-up pretenses, and God seems to be in that number.
Jerry: Well, interesting, because this is the only place I believe God is mentioned explicitly in the Preface, and God rarely comes up in the book. Maybe His witness is occasionally mentioned. But one of the things that’s striking me now is that God, here, is slightly off stage. Because you’re talking about people who are being sincere in their desires and pursuing those, living them out, looking for true love and being honest about that if it doesn’t work.
And, in Confessions, God is not seen issuing commands, directives or establishing norms—you know, “here are the Ten Commandments, you’ve all got to jump to those commandments,”—and isn’t a big actor, where you pray, “bring me a miracle and make everything all right.” But the crucial role of God is probably captured by the term “Witness.” That we live with a divine Witness. And that doesn’t need to be said over and over. Because it’s not, uh-oh, as if God, like Santa, will know if I’ve been naughty or nice. It’s not that kind of scrutiny. Rather, it’s just that I want to live a life that I’m not ashamed for God to see. That honors the vertical dimension or the ideal dimension in life. And the ideal dimension, the way you talk about it sweetheart, is contained right within life. What follows is that, in principle, you can trust your God-given desire system. That is what has licensed a book which is not about God as such, but about pursuing desires, and pursuing strategies that work for desires, ideas that work, and then you find, over and over, ideas that don’t work, which is how you learn what does work, hopefully, by discovering what doesn’t work.
Abigail: Yes, it seems I was very concerned not to be a phony. And one of the species of phonies, to my eye, was stoicism. “I’ll just grit my teeth, I’ll grin and bear it, I’ll put a good face on a bad scene.” That seemed to me phony. No baby comes out of the womb as a stoic. If you’ve had any, they squall when they’re not happy. So I did not want to be brave in the sense that the grown-up world commends, where adulthood consists in grinning and bearing it. A bad hand of cards is not something to lie to oneself about. I mean, you don’t want to be socially a problem person, always pouting and complaining—that’s not what I’m talking about. But you don’t want to pretend it’s okay when it’s not.
Jerry: You know, there are all these complications in life, and of course you’re going to encounter them. I’m abstracting them from the Preface, and in the book we will see the complications exemplified in 3D, with many more downsides, problems, pitfalls, and so forth as you live life.
Because anyone can say that, “Oh I want to be sincere, I want to live my ideas.” Well, that’s easy to say, right? It could be in a fortune cookie, you know, “Live your ideas.” But to actually live them isn’t that easy, and it has pitfall, pitfall, pitfall, because there’s a limited number of good ideas and a lot of bad ideas. Something like that is what you go through.
Abigail: Yes, you make your way through the human surround, the human scene, in which, unless you’re winning every contest that you enter—and I sure wasn’t—you’re not well understood. People kind of avert their eyes out of self-protection in order to keep their own system, their life system, going. And so you find yourself much more alone than you ever set out to be. You didn’t even ask yourself, will I be alone? But you can make some choices that put you out there alone for one reason or another. So there are all kinds of unforeseen traps, pitfalls, hazards, insuperable obstacles to climb over that they didn’t tell you about.
Jerry: It’s interesting because we’re looking at the complications, challenges, difficulties and so forth. But this is the Preface, you know. You’re leaving home for the first time, headed to Paris on a Fulbright. What an adventure. And you say, was I fearful? No, no, I was filled with desire and thought I was ready for anything. Well, you weren’t quite ready for anything, but you were ready to be ready for anything. And I doubt that you regret that cheerful launching of yourself into the world via Paris.
Abigail: No, it was very sincere. I had comrades, you know, fellow Fulbrights, people I chummed with that year. Many of them were somewhat cynical, somewhat wary, armored, defensive.
Jerry: They’re all young, right? They’re essentially students, advanced students or something, and a bunch of them headed to Paris for this year’s fellowship, right? And so you’re all comparing notes with each other in this new scene, exciting scene of Paris.
Abigail: Yes. I might have been as open and wide-eyed as any of us got to be. I had a friend or two. I’m thinking of my friend John Armstrong who, like me, wanted to test his ideals against the real world. And that could be thought childish. Most people didn’t talk about their ideals in contradistinction to the real world, but John did.
Jerry: That’s quite a story. When you get to the book, that’s another story. What struck me as hard as anything in the whole book is the story of John Armstrong. Yes, but this openness—which you still have, sweetheart.
Abigail: Oh, good for me.
Jerry: When we fell in love, your colleagues warned you against it because they’re worldly-wise. But you close yourself off to a lot if you’re just worldly wise. You know, “Oh, don’t go there, you can’t go there, this won’t work, that won’t work.” And your attitude, that you already expressed throughout this Preface is, “Well, let’s find out.”
Abigail: Yes, I’m not a philosophe for nothing. I’m a philosopher. I want to know the truth as I encounter it. I can’t know the truth about things where I have no access—which are multitudinous—but I have access to my own story, and I want to know the truth about it.
Jerry: Yes, and Confessions of a Young Philosopher is the record of that search for truth in your own life. Well, thank you, sweetheart. I enjoyed talking to you. I get to talk to you anytime, but it’s kind of nice to talk in this formal way about your very book, which I’m so pleased is out now.
Abigail: I’m very pleased too, because things I didn’t know came to light in the course of this conversation. It’s been novel and instructive for me.
Jerry: Oh, well, good, good, good. Well, I hope you have some more discussions with some of the women we know who are very interesting and will have a lot of questions, probably of a different sort. I’m A) a man and B) a professional philosopher, which has its own, you know, kind of narrowing of focus. But I certainly got a lot from it, and I’m glad you did too.
Abigail: I did.
Jerry: Okay, I think that’s all for today, sweetheart.
Today Dr. Jerry L. Martin and Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal (author of Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column) carry forward last week’s discussion of her new book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher. Let’s see how their discussion continues.
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Jerry: You just believed in seeking your passion or something like that—finding out, living sincerely, what you desire and believe. Well, there’s another quote that addresses some of the things we’ve just been talking about. You say, “I did feel obligated, as a Jewish girl who was not stupid, to situate my life on the larger map of human striving in a world that was wide, not narrow. I wanted to know where I was and not just in the realm of personal options. I sought to get my bearings and location in human history itself. I just wanted to know how to find me in the bigger story.”
That always struck me because it never occurred to me myself in life to try to find my place in history. You know, where am I? There’s a big map, you know. I mean, I would have answered, “Oh, I’m a 21st-century American.” That would have been about it—middle class or whatever. But you’re asking a deeper question than, “Are you a 21st-century American?” You want to find “me,” and that word is again emphasized in the text. “I wanted to find me in the larger story.”
Abigail: I guess you can’t quite catapult yourself back into the body and the mind that you had when you were 21. So I can only tell you what comes to mind now, but I believe it’s accurate as a memory. And it’s a funny thing, what comes to mind now is the Jewish picture. That the people I knew were lineal descendants of the patriarchs. So the span of time—which for me represented and stood in for human time, which is really hundreds of thousands of years—was about 3,000 years. The people I knew seemed to be silhouetted or given more emphatic contours by their relation, which wasn’t a clear one in my own mind, their relation to the biblical prototypes. My grandfather, with his white beard, could have been any patriarch. My mother, her name was Rachel—Rachelle—seemed to me a good stand-in for the biblical original.
I don’t know whether this is typical of children or typical of Jewish children. An anthropologist could go digging. But in my imagination, the people of now had a connection to these prototypes. When I meant history, I didn’t merely mean chronology. I meant meaningful history, with consequential personalities, who carried some of the freight of the past, by means of which they supported legitimate projects that touched the future. Human beings stood between a meaningful, consequential past and a meaningful, consequential future. And what they did had to be in line with that lineage of meaningfulness, that lineage of significance.
Jerry: Yes and that sounds like the kind of history lived out—precisely the way you were trying to live life—in a way that’s sincere, where you live your ideas. You don’t just parade them as ornaments but you live them. And it sounds like that kind of history has that character, that it’s what you call meaningful, and meaningful in the sense that we call a life meaningful. You know, not meaningful in the sense that I can decipher it, but in that richer sense in which we said, ah, Thoreau had a very meaningful life. You know, didn’t just write well, but lived meaningfully. And so did Lincoln and various other people. Joan of Arc comes to mind and I’ve written about her. You know, there are all these people who do populate history and make it meaningful.
Abigail: Yes, and I don’t recall thinking that I needed to be one of those great ones. Meaningful for me did not mean famous. It did not mean grabbing a headline. It meant getting aligned with a consequential life purpose that was inherently, intrinsically, naturally one’s own. It was there to be found. You didn’t make it up. By contrast people got into theatricality, habits of being “interesting” in an eccentric and artificial way. Theatricality struck me as definitely Plan B or Plan C.
Jerry: It’s not a pose, an artistic stance, or a theatrical stance. It’s not even trying to, as young people often say, “make a difference.” Even that is an external standard. As we know, I could do something—maybe march on something that it’s good to be against—and make a difference. Those may be very good things to do, but not closely related to the question you raised earlier in this preface: what are your deepest desires? You know, what is it you really desire, and you need to be sincere about that. You’ve said that basically people desire true love, and they need to be sincere about that, which means try to live that out.
Abigail: And, of course, in the life stories of the biblical archetypes, each one is a man who has to find the right woman if he is to go forward with his God project. The project is to start something that puts God here on terra firma. On the earth. In the historical time-bound place where we all have to live. Let’s get that down here. It’s interesting that none of the patriarchs are robbed of their heart’s desires. They’re not unlucky in love. They’re luckyin love. So I think I put it together. I’m not good at chemistry, but I think I put the formula together: oh I see, they’re carrying forward God’s plan and it seems to require the right woman. That they be there as a couple, that they be happy erotically, naturally, on the plane of real life and not just instead of real life!
Jerry: In these cases at least—and maybe you think more broadly about this—loving the person you love doesn’t put you in competition with God’s plan. It’s not as though your true love and God are rivals or at cross purposes with one another. Your view seems to be more like the opposite of that.
Abigail: Yes. And, with all due deference to the truths in the New Testament, Jesus seems to represent a more ascetic vocation: “leave your father and mother; leave your earthly obligations; you have a higher calling; follow me.”
And some biblical critics who pondered that suggest there was a general expectation that Jesus shared—that the world was about to end—and therefore normal family life should be suspended. Because something was imminent that would trump all that. But since I wasn’t raised in that New Testament climate of opinion, my prototypes were in the Hebrew scriptures. They did not support an otherworldly life plan.
All that, plus personal watching the grown-ups, led me to think that finding true love had to be Plan A. Otherwise, you were compensating for the loss of true love.
USCGC Lilac in New York Harbor with sunken sailing ship in foreground, 1940.
Today, Dr. Jerry L. Martin and Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal (author of Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column) carry forward last week’s discussion of Confessions of a Young Philosopher. Let’s see how their discussion continues.
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Jerry: Having said that true love is Plan A for most people, you then say something about cynicism, which may be the contrary of true love. After all it’s one route one can take in life, to give up on X, Y, and Z, whatever your original aspirations were. Whereas you say, “Cynicism was a rigid filter I declined to wear. It too was insincere, I thought. Cynics, I felt sure, expressed disappointment. To me it seemed more honest to honor one’s original hope and make a second or third attempt to realize it. Better to remember how the first got thwarted and try not to make the same mistakes again. That would be preferable to abandoning the aspiration.”
Suppose a person has lived through a series of one hopeless love after another. So what’s your advice? Well, this one didn’t work out, and then I thought another one would, and that one didn’t. And now you know, a third came along and I don’t know how that’s going to work out, but I think better to abandon this whole effort. People come to that as a kind of practical or maybe worldly-wise way of understanding life.
Abigail: It just comes to me that the people who inhabited and peopled my parents’ home were none of them cynics. And, by the same token, it comes to me that the rather celebrated and achieved public intellectuals that I would come across from time to time immediately failed to interest me, because one of the ways they sported their sophistication would tend to be, to express their views of life with an overlay, a patina of cynicism. They were worldly in what to me was an intensely boring way.
Please! I don’t want to be bothered with your “worldliness.” It’s a patina! It’s varnish! It’s not you. You couldn’t be as interesting with your worldliness as you might have once been before you got to be that worldly. You know your youth has been varnished and that’s called worldliness—and it struck me as a human failure.
Jerry: They treat people like you, with your attitude, as naive. As if patting you on the head and saying you know, little girl, get real! The older cynic says that to the young romantic.
Abigail: Yes, and I thought. No, you have to unlearn what you think you learned because it spoiled you. You know, you’re like a tomato or an orange that’s been sitting out too long.
Jerry: It is a crucial feature of you and your personal situation as you explain that you were a Jewish girl, born and raised in Manhattan, now in Paris, away from home for the first time. You do say that the Holocaust was happening when you were very very young, and it made you aware of the moral seriousness of history.
Abigail: If we’re talking about how to understand the Abigail who sets forth on her life journey in the opening pages of this book, I could be deemed naive. But about the hovering presence of unspeakable horror at the outside of this visual screen of the world that I was looking at, I couldn’t be unaware of that. My father had been in the rabbinate in his younger days. They brought ten families over, refugee families from Europe, while one still could. You had to find sponsors and I remember my mother repeating what she said to one or more of these sponsors who had to assure the State Department that the refugees would not become a public charge. The sponsors had to promise to support these people if they didn’t get work. Mother would say to some rich man, “I promise you, you will never see them. Don’t worry! Just sign on the dotted line. We’ll pick up the pieces if need be.” And these refugees were in our house.
Jerry: Some gave you your early dentistry, I gather.
Abigail: Oh yes, if they couldn’t get an American license, they worked on me and it really hurt enough to scream. But you know, “That’s life!”
Jerry: That’s the price.
Abigail: I mean, they were very weird people, many of them. One of them was a communist. He used to leave leaflets in my mother’s lingerie drawer, you know, in the bedroom. I don’t know why he thought if she picks up the leaflets when she’s reaching for a piece of lingerie, that’s going to strike her as revelatory. It certainly didn’t, but I was aware that people were coming from murder, you know, a surround of murder.
My mother captured … we lived on the edge of Yorkville, which was the German-American neighborhood … .
Jerry: In New York City.
Abigail: We lived in a walkup apartment building on 86th and Park. You know, in Manhattan, an apartment house is taken care of by the superintendent. Our superintendent, Mr. Z, would tell the tenants not to go down to the basement where storage was located. He would carry tenants’ suitcases or trunks down to the basement himself. My mother, who was not naive—she was the daughter of the chief rabbi of Odessa—paid attention to Mr. Z. Especially one time, when he was fixing the radiator and remarked, “It will be very good when Hitler gets here.” You know, an American-born person might dismiss that as ethnic pride or something. But my mother knew the difference between ethnic pride and a purposeful statement. So her ears went up.
Her next clue came in the form of two middle-aged men with German accents who rang the doorbell on a floor beneath ours. It was opened by an equally middle-aged woman with hair that was not gray, tied back in a severe bun. They said to her, smiling, “Guten morgen, großmutter.” Grandmother. And my mother thought, “She’s not old enough to be their grandmother.”
Immediately, my mother went downstairs to Park Avenue and 86th Street where their car was parked. In those days, there weren’t a lot of cars on the street. She read the license number, memorizing it as she went back up the stairs to our place, saying it again and again to herself while carrying my sister and me in one arm and another. She wrote it down, got on a bus, and went to the FBI headquarters in midtown. They listened. They paid attention, as she did. They made a raid on Mr. Z’s basement, where the tenants were not supposed to go, and found a shortwave radio and equipment by which he could reach … I don’t know, was it U-boats?
Jerry: There were U-boats off New York harbor, monitoring when the fleet was moving in and out, where they’re going.
Abigail: Exactly. They took Mr. Z off to what I think of as Volleyball Camp for the duration of the hostilities. I sometimes joke that maybe my mother saved New York. You know, maybe it’s not a joke. She saw him again in 1946 or ’47, after the war was over, and she said that he gave her “a very sour look.”
Jerry: She certainly spoiled the war for him.
Abigail: Exactly. Party’s over, Mr. Z. You don’t get to destroy New York or whatever he was planning. He was planning something. Why did they need a contact on 86th and Park?
Jerry: What was hiding in the basement that they didn’t want anybody to see?
Abigail: They also helped to bring over Raphael Lemkin, the author of the Genocide Convention.
Jerry: Oh, wow.
Abigail: My mother said that, like the painter Modigliani, he was “a Jew with one idea.”
Jerry: But it was a big one. It was a big idea.
Abigail: When Lemkin came to my high school to talk about genocide, I walked up to him after the talk and said, “I’m the daughter of Rachelle Rosenthal.” And he kissed me. So I, with the stamp of Lemkin’s kiss and the memory of Mr. Z’s excursions in the basement, I was not born yesterday regarding the seriousness of real life. I remember feeling in my childhood that my parents were naive to think we would win the war. I thought we might lose it. I don’t know why I thought that.
Jerry: Well, you were right. Any war can be either won or lost, and they were assuming—it’s an assumption that makes it easier to bear each day, to assume we’re going to come out on top, whoever the “we” is in one of these struggles—a war or some other struggle. And you, as this child without heavy preconceptions, thought, “Yikes, we could lose!”
Abigail: Yes, as Longfellow says, “Life is real, life is earnest, and the grave is not its goal.” Life was real and earnest. I wasn’t proceeding on my little trajectory to Paris, France, with the idea of, you know, “Maybe I’ll have a romance, maybe I’ll see the Eiffel Tower.” Rather, I felt, “This is closer to where conflicts that have changed history occur.”
All of us Fulbright grantees wanted to know “the real Paris.” We didn’t want to stay on the touristic surface. You know, you go to a place, you want to make contact with the essence of that place. You don’t want it to pass you by. And you don’t want to pass it by. This is your youth. This is something of the greatest consequence. Something that will mark the future. So I had all that. And it included, I’m sure, a sense that very much hangs on changes in history.
Jerry: And your mother really gave the demonstration of the fact that an individual can make a big, big difference. You don’t know in advance because history is too big and complicated, but anyone who reads history knows that occasionally someone just puts their finger in the dike at the right moment and saves the day. There are multiple examples of that. Or they do the opposite and drop the ball, and, ah, disaster comes. It’s the attack on Pearl Harbor. Messages either not getting through, some ignored you know—don’t call me again, that kind of thing—and then you have the Pearl Harbor disaster. The beginning of the World War II, the war in the Pacific. Incredible things can happen either way.
Abigail: Yes, exactly. So that my desire to live unencumbered by premature cynicism or premature know-it-all-ism, which is similar, was not a concomitant of youthful illusions. I had a sense that the steps you take in life are potentially of high consequence. And life itself is full of consequence.
Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions: Preface, Part 3
Today Dr. Jerry L. Martin and Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal (author of Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column) carry forward last week’s discussion of her new book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher. Let’s see how their discussion continues.
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Jerry: You just believed in seeking your passion or something like that—finding out, living sincerely, what you desire and believe. Well, there’s another quote that addresses some of the things we’ve just been talking about. You say, “I did feel obligated, as a Jewish girl who was not stupid, to situate my life on the larger map of human striving in a world that was wide, not narrow. I wanted to know where I was and not just in the realm of personal options. I sought to get my bearings and location in human history itself. I just wanted to know how to find me in the bigger story.”
That always struck me because it never occurred to me myself in life to try to find my place in history. You know, where am I? There’s a big map, you know. I mean, I would have answered, “Oh, I’m a 21st-century American.” That would have been about it—middle class or whatever. But you’re asking a deeper question than, “Are you a 21st-century American?” You want to find “me,” and that word is again emphasized in the text. “I wanted to find me in the larger story.”
Abigail: I guess you can’t quite catapult yourself back into the body and the mind that you had when you were 21. So I can only tell you what comes to mind now, but I believe it’s accurate as a memory. And it’s a funny thing, what comes to mind now is the Jewish picture. That the people I knew were lineal descendants of the patriarchs. So the span of time—which for me represented and stood in for human time, which is really hundreds of thousands of years—was about 3,000 years. The people I knew seemed to be silhouetted or given more emphatic contours by their relation, which wasn’t a clear one in my own mind, their relation to the biblical prototypes. My grandfather, with his white beard, could have been any patriarch. My mother, her name was Rachel—Rachelle—seemed to me a good stand-in for the biblical original.
I don’t know whether this is typical of children or typical of Jewish children. An anthropologist could go digging. But in my imagination, the people of now had a connection to these prototypes. When I meant history, I didn’t merely mean chronology. I meant meaningful history, with consequential personalities, who carried some of the freight of the past, by means of which they supported legitimate projects that touched the future. Human beings stood between a meaningful, consequential past and a meaningful, consequential future. And what they did had to be in line with that lineage of meaningfulness, that lineage of significance.
Jerry: Yes and that sounds like the kind of history lived out—precisely the way you were trying to live life—in a way that’s sincere, where you live your ideas. You don’t just parade them as ornaments but you live them. And it sounds like that kind of history has that character, that it’s what you call meaningful, and meaningful in the sense that we call a life meaningful. You know, not meaningful in the sense that I can decipher it, but in that richer sense in which we said, ah, Thoreau had a very meaningful life. You know, didn’t just write well, but lived meaningfully. And so did Lincoln and various other people. Joan of Arc comes to mind and I’ve written about her. You know, there are all these people who do populate history and make it meaningful.
Abigail: Yes, and I don’t recall thinking that I needed to be one of those great ones. Meaningful for me did not mean famous. It did not mean grabbing a headline. It meant getting aligned with a consequential life purpose that was inherently, intrinsically, naturally one’s own. It was there to be found. You didn’t make it up. By contrast people got into theatricality, habits of being “interesting” in an eccentric and artificial way. Theatricality struck me as definitely Plan B or Plan C.
Jerry: It’s not a pose, an artistic stance, or a theatrical stance. It’s not even trying to, as young people often say, “make a difference.” Even that is an external standard. As we know, I could do something—maybe march on something that it’s good to be against—and make a difference. Those may be very good things to do, but not closely related to the question you raised earlier in this preface: what are your deepest desires? You know, what is it you really desire, and you need to be sincere about that. You’ve said that basically people desire true love, and they need to be sincere about that, which means try to live that out.
Abigail: And, of course, in the life stories of the biblical archetypes, each one is a man who has to find the right woman if he is to go forward with his God project. The project is to start something that puts God here on terra firma. On the earth. In the historical time-bound place where we all have to live. Let’s get that down here. It’s interesting that none of the patriarchs are robbed of their heart’s desires. They’re not unlucky in love. They’re lucky in love. So I think I put it together. I’m not good at chemistry, but I think I put the formula together: oh I see, they’re carrying forward God’s plan and it seems to require the right woman. That they be there as a couple, that they be happy erotically, naturally, on the plane of real life and not just instead of real life!
Jerry: In these cases at least—and maybe you think more broadly about this—loving the person you love doesn’t put you in competition with God’s plan. It’s not as though your true love and God are rivals or at cross purposes with one another. Your view seems to be more like the opposite of that.
Abigail: Yes. And, with all due deference to the truths in the New Testament, Jesus seems to represent a more ascetic vocation: “leave your father and mother; leave your earthly obligations; you have a higher calling; follow me.”
And some biblical critics who pondered that suggest there was a general expectation that Jesus shared—that the world was about to end—and therefore normal family life should be suspended. Because something was imminent that would trump all that. But since I wasn’t raised in that New Testament climate of opinion, my prototypes were in the Hebrew scriptures. They did not support an otherworldly life plan.
All that, plus personal watching the grown-ups, led me to think that finding true love had to be Plan A. Otherwise, you were compensating for the loss of true love.
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