Flight from Ein Sof Read online

  As for the “tradition” that would have me take the reins of the clan, however briefly, I found it inequitable and demented. To vest the powers of family rule in one man is to weaken the independence of both the ruler and the ruled. The former, charged with enforcing traditions, lacks the incentive (or courage) to change them, while the latter is constrained by statutes and protocols that deserve to be rescinded, should they so much as violate legitimate individual rights -- but never are.

  *

  What emerges from the doctrinal struggles that cleave society is a frenzied tug-of-war between conflicting ideas. Essential truths are often trampled in the process. Everybody has “beliefs,” opinions, pet views. Much of our mental constructs are erected on a vast scaffolding of dogmas, generally someone else’s, often someone who precedes us by decades, centuries, if not millennia and whose canons we never question, however skewed, antiquated or unjust.

  Keen on cramming dormant brain cells, we adopt these creeds and tenets, we cling to them, claiming they are the offspring of our own cogitations because they encourage us not to think, because they shield us from what we fear most -- reality -- because they keep us warm and cozy in our self-created doctrinal cocoons.

  Back in my day, as I do now without compunction, I faced my reality and I bared it with conscious self-abandon every time I composed essays and commentaries, aware that candor and disquieting facts will trigger caustic ripostes and bitter condemnation.

  The deconstructionist arguments advanced by the rabble to malign my columns may have sounded, at first blush, rhetorically alluring. But all they did in the process was to articulate other points of view, none of which could legitimately claim to echo some irrefutable truth. In free societies, however absurd, all opinions are charitably granted a status of equivalence.

  What also transpires from some of my detractors’ critiques -- Yossi’s warning that I not exceed the limits of “philosophical freedom” comes to mind -- is the malignant suggestion that finding and telling the truth is tantamount to apostasy. Everybody read my words, one by one, but they all stumbled on the verities they conveyed.

  I don’t pretend to have all the answers. I dig for the truth, groping in the miasmic darkness of ignorance and fear. I ask questions, some troubling, some unendurable. What I uncover will never be to everyone’s liking. Muckraking is not a popularity contest. I take no special pleasure in chronicling the ills of mankind, for in them I discover my own frailties and shortcomings.

  Yes, there are more opinions than facts and yes, we are enamored of them. After all, opinions can blithely disregard, defy and, if need be, corrupt the truth. Tainted fruits of ignorance and self-delusion (or planted seeds of malice) opinions can also conveniently overlook faulty data or peddle arguments riddled with ideological monstrosities. Opinions shield us from the risks of personal experience.

  In the mouths of demagogues, personal convictions assume dangerous dimensions: They are no longer what can be borne out by deduction or experience but what opinion-mongers themselves can pull off. Regurgitated by imbeciles, they are promptly espoused by other imbeciles.

  Voicing an opinion, especially unsolicited, is an incorrigible human reflex. Every time we inhale a wisp of fact, we exhale a gust of inferences. Opinions have merit when they stimulate inquiry and rational dialogue, when they embody essential truths, when they are advanced with lucidity and when, having withstood the rigors of scrutiny, they harmonize with the facts they endeavor to interpret. Opinions are worthless when, by their ferocity or absurdity, they inhibit the coherent exchange of ideas or, worse, when they are contrived to manipulate or obscure the truth.

  Advocates of extreme political and religious dogma, as are some of my most virulent foes, have been particularly adept at blurring the truth to advance their own agendas (or deflect the glare of incontrovertible fact). The greater their zeal in promoting their causes (or silencing their ideological opposites), the more tempting it becomes for them to suggest that freethinkers, iconoclasts and gadflies (the vast majority of honest journalists) are not merely wrong but are actually engaged in some sinister cabal designed to expose impious or discomfiting truths. In practice, this mindset leads to brainwashing, as witch-hunts ancient and modern have shown.

  Only those willing to question the validity of “conventional wisdom” ever get closer to the truth. Fallacious reasoning, licit as it might be, is a greater enemy of truth than an outright lie. It is the prison in which we lock ourselves to feign a clear conscience. As someone once remarked, a clear conscience is usually the sign of a very bad memory. This willful myopia helps subvert good judgment and defile the truth.

  Troublesome facts, computed by rational minds, are more useful than myths peddled by uninformed or self-righteous crusaders. When flock mentality is at play, as it was the other night in the communal hall, it is the myths, alas, that capture the imagination of the majority. Inflexible convictions render men blind, arrogant and, carried to the extreme, mad.

  NINE

  “Why do you insist on making enemies,” my father asked as we sat down to a game of chess. “Have you learned nothing from the hostility, and chagrin your views and pronouncements have caused?”

  My father never indulged in idle criticism. His was an irrefutable statement of fact, one that echoed the inner struggles that marked his life. Born and raised in near-poverty by loving but simple, unschooled and unmotivated parents, he quickly concluded that an education was his passport to freedom, physical and intellectual. Ironically, an education delivered him into another form of slavery, one that would call for an even greater degree of devotion and compliance than the disciplines endured in his childhood’s confining theocratic milieu. Proud, principled, mindful of his reputation, he would spend the rest of his life obeying the Hippocratic Oath. He was indeed an excellent physician. He would have been a brilliant astronomer, tailor or blacksmith if that’s what he had aimed to be. An unwavering sense of duty would have imparted dignity and worth to any task he undertook. He would have worked long and hard to refine needed skills. He would have peered into the blackness of space until his eyes gave out; crafted the smartest apparel; forged the finest horseshoes until exhaustion had weakened his grip. But I know of no occupation that would have given him lasting satisfaction, let alone happiness. Medicine did not. The career that was to free him from the bonds of destitution would become a burden that he valiantly and scrupulously endured all of his life while lamenting the frailty and imperfection of the human body and deploring the maddening inexactitude of medical science. The emotional toll daily issues of life and death claimed on a restless man convinced of the futility of existence was incalculable.

  “Humanity is an absurd happenstance and a calamity,” he said in a rare moment of unguarded melancholy. “If Sisyphus weren't so busy rolling his rock up the hill he'd be laughing his head off at us. But he is us.”

  A lifetime of empathy toward others, repaid with indifference or unkindness, had found him exhausted, depleted. Caring too deeply, he had discovered, can bruise the heart and harden the soul. The “long shortcut to nowhere” had turned him inside out and left him empty and vulnerable.

  Unlike one of his distant cousins, a noted prize-winning writer, my father never waxed mystical about his roots. He derived neither strength nor pride from them. Grief-stricken at the loss of his parents and siblings, stunned by the sheer barbarity of the Holocaust, he first toyed with the idea that Jews had been predestined to martyrdom. He quickly rejected that notion and concluded that suffering is universal and indiscriminate, and that it begins at birth for both man and beast. Although he would never think of himself as anything but a Jew, his Jewishness was circumstantial, utterly devoid of affectation and lacking the visceral transcendentalism, the truculence that accompanied the clan’s faith.

  “An ant doesn’t wonder why it isn’t a butterfly. I didn’t ask myself why I’m a Jew. I still don’t. It would be un-Jewish of me to ask such an absurd question. I am what I have created. My whole
is larger than the sum total of my hereditary parts.”

  It was this repudiation of an irreversible fate, of a fixed and inevitable future, bolstered by his view of the world as a godless and irrational affair of ceaseless striving and affliction that led my father to shake the last congenital remnants of religiosity. He would also abjure the Kabbalah, in which he had dabbled throughout his life. Like his father before him, he had spent countless hours “meandering in stupefied fascination” along its cerebral minefields. At first, he had felt intellectually kindled but the leaps of comprehension, not to mention the leaps of faith the Kabbalah demands, had left him exhausted and confused. Ultimately, it was the Kabbalah’s hyper-deterministic character that prompted my father to dismiss this, the most arcane of all Jewish philosophical systems as “a disquieting pastime for the idle, borderline monomaniacs or candidates for lunacy.” The Kabbalah, he would conclude, not only trivializes human hopes, knowledge, dreams and the legitimacy of voluntary action or inaction, it effectively discourages rational and deliberate action of any kind. Any system that pledges to temper human perplexities and lead to enlightenment through occultism, he held, delivers false hope and leads to disillusionment.

  “A real man does not submit meekly to his maker’s caprices. A real man takes risks. He challenges the very odds that are stacked against him.” In this bitter advice I recognized both a veiled rebuke of his own father, a theosophist who fought boredom and sought refuge from his own inadequacies in the Kabbalah’s misty realm, and an admonition to his only son -- me -- to stand tall and yield to no one.

  Late in life, overwhelmed by old age, which he described as “a heavy garment,” and bewildered by the Kabbalah’s abstruseness, repelled by “the effeminacy of mysticism,” my father sought succor and guidance from the “undeviating honesty of realism.”

  In time, he would also turn away from God, describing “it” as “blinkered, ethnocentric and self-absorbed.” He would continue to read the Bible, however, until the end of his life. Far from seeking comfort, he was looking to topple hallowed heroes and challenge cherished convictions by pointing to the contradictions, the lies, the betrayals, the greed, the violence, the cruelty, the depravity, the bestial godlessness of man, the insufferable inhumanity of God. Concluding that all human actions and “godly edicts” are motivated by abject self-interest, he would find in the ancient texts the ammunition he needed to launch vitriolic attacks against the very lore that had suffused his childhood, drawing instant and furious wrath from friends, colleagues and family.

  Accused of heresy, my father would find further evidence of human vanity and intolerance in their attitude, a revelation that inevitably engendered fresh assaults and earned him further scorn and alienation.

  A few days before he left Yesod for Ein Sof, reflecting on his own metamorphosis, no doubt troubled by mine, he counseled against reckless pursuits and glib conclusions.

  “Seeking the truth is not a spectator sport. It must be done in private, in a tête-à-tête with one’s own conscience, away from partisan influences and purged of all acquired preconceptions.”

  The truth he had referred to was several orders of magnitude removed from mine. I can only imagine how painful it must have been for him to watch the comforting warmth of imparted beliefs irrevocably replaced with the chilling emptiness of reason. In the end, hollowed out, he had sought asylum in a vacuum that could never be filled. I must find comfort in the notion that he may have been at odds with the world, as I am, but at peace with himself.

  *

  “Enemies are not made, Dad. You should know this better than anyone. Didn’t you once exhort me to fight for what I believe? Enemies lie dormant, like a wicked virus ready to invade a vulnerable host. They exist, like nettles and poison oak and scorpions and asps. They thrive and proliferate like dandelions and crab grass. Favorable winds -- hatred, envy, greed, contempt, ignorance -- carry their seeds to the four corners. The odium with which my enemies are filled is a reflection of their personalities. A snake produces venom whether it intends to strike at a prey or not. ‘Just in case’ is the motto of the human predator.”

  My father sighed. “You’re right but logic and reason, however clearly and rationally expounded, can’t bring back 20/20 vision to those who suffer from self-inflicted myopia. You can’t change reality, let alone alter the reality that others choose to acknowledge or ignore. Not here. Not in Ein Sof. What you see, what you hear, what you experience, tangibly and abstractly, is immovable, final.”

  As he spoke, I could hear, drifting from the communal room in waves of cadenced strains, the otherworldly harmonies of Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain. I closed my eyes. Childhood memories of Disney’s Fantasia glided past me like falling leaves swept by an autumn gust. The Angelus bell rang in the distance. The first rays of dawn drove vixens and warlocks back to their dens and the gauzy spirits of the dead floated back to their graves for yet another day of rest.

  TEN

  I returned to the gloomy depths of Gehenna looking for answers. I’d been perusing Spinoza’s Ethics and Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity. Separated by three centuries, the philosopher and the physicist had both studied relativity, the first to explore the metaphysical realm, the second to postulate immutable cosmic laws. They reached broadly similar conclusions, among them that perception depends on vantage point.

  Spinoza buoyed his argument by proposing -- swiftly earning him excommunication and centuries of Jewish and Christian antipathy -- that much of human consciousness is based, not on fact, but on how we are conditioned to interpret the occurrence of being. There are no wrong answers, he proposes, only divergent opinions which are themselves blurred by conformity to an acquired optic. In other words, truth is in the mind’s eye of the beholder.

  Einstein also theorized that reality is merely an illusion, “albeit a very persistent one.” He went a step further. He declared that perceptions can actually alter the experience of reality. I had an opportunity to test this strange concept, not in the perfect geometry of space, nor in the sterile labyrinths of Cartesian logic, but in a realm that has grown and spilled over its own boundaries like a gangrenous sore, far from the synthetic harmony of Ein Sof where the well-to-do live in stifling isolation.

  It was still dark as I worked my way to the bridge. I came upon sleepy-eyed children pulling heavy loads, sweaty cadaverous men packed like sardines in rickety trucks belching black smoke, half submerged under the garbage they were ferrying from one end of the chasm to the other. Perpetual garbage, I reckoned.

  Huddled like newborn pups against the scurfy wall of an abandoned building, young boys slept, their arms crossed against the chill of night, their fingers clasping their shoulders. Others, stirring from a thin, turbulent slumber, were getting ready, in lieu of breakfast, to take the long and excruciating way out of reality by sniffing glue.

  Further on, resting on a bed of filthy rags near the gutter, a woman dozed fitfully with an infant at her breast while an older child begged for scraps of food and wiped an ever-runny nose on the sleeve of a threadbare sweater. Ahead, past the bridge, in a huge crater-like depression teeming with vultures, I found toddlers and young teens feeding on garbage. Knee-deep in steaming mountains of waste and competing with the loathsome winged scavengers, another group of youngsters rummaged for a meal, a slipper, perhaps a broken toy to brighten an otherwise joyless childhood.

  And when I ventured past the festering hollow, I chanced upon a living ghost. I have no other words to describe her. She has no name. Madness robs people of all identity. Madness, in her case, further sharpens the alienation, the anonymity. She has no name. She has earned the scorn of her own wretched kind and she will pass in this dimension and from this moment in time unnoticed, even by her fellow Dybbuks. Surely, a name, a common moniker would give her substance, if not legitimacy. But she’s been forgotten. Insanity and amnesia have mercifully yanked her from the clutches of reality. Yet she is real, irritatingly so, the symbol and victim of the d
ysfunctional society that spawned her. Shunned, loathed, she inspires revulsion, not mercy, for she is unrepentant, defiant in her grotesque cardboard palace, amid the debris, the scraps of metal, the offal on which she feeds, the useless memories that haunt her still, come rain or come shine, come hell or high water.

  Her partner-in-grime, ageless, toothless, feral and mad, too mad to erect her own shelter, sits by her companion’s side or steals forty winks on the naked pavement, curled up in a fetal position, her two hands pressed together to form a cushion under her cheek. Wielding a yard of rubber tubing, or an old broom, she chases after man and specter with equal fury, a menacing fist raised against oncoming traffic and snickering children, striking the ground with anger and bewilderment, no, with exasperation, spitting at passers by, pelting them with invectives. Sometimes folly crests like an open flame and a torrent of tears drenches her grand-motherly face. Overwhelmed by the sheer intensity of her frustration, she calms down, tunes in briefly on the world around her, then resumes her silent vigil, a lifeless gaze now focused on an all-consuming void.

  One day, a gang of thugs swooped down on Gehenna and smashed the paper, string and plastic scaffolding her friend had erected. Even a place of torment such as Gehenna, I mused, has its pitiless enforcers, its dim-witted disciplinarians. The woman put up a fierce battle but the enforcers prevailed. Trampled by uncaring feet, the decimated remains of her flimsy abode were carted away and thrust aside under the bridge where Ein Sof’s trash and raw sewage eventually end up. She was allowed to bed down on the bare ground and fend for herself.

  Up the road, in the narrow, slop-splattered alley that hugs the flanks of an old church, a man writhed in drug-induced agony. Frothing at the mouth, his eyes on fire, he crumbled to the ground and let out a blood-curdling wail. Clawing at the demons that tormented him, thrashing about, he rolled into the gutter and narrowly missed being hit by a speeding garbage truck.