To my dismay, I had another email lecture from that friend in Israel. (Part 1 is here) She told me she was my friend, and loved me, no matter what I thought, though she couldn’t force me to be friends with her. She told me if I was looking for a judge, she was not the right person. She accused me of trying to make an enemy of her. She told me again that I need professional help. She assured me that she did not take sides in this “divorce” from my old friends. She wrote “WTF!” followed by an indignant protestation that her characterization of me and what I need to do, and have, according to her, refused to do thus far, was not in the least bit judgmental. She asked, as if I hadn’t explained it in detail a few times already, why I was so angry.

I took a few breaths, and a day and a half, and sent her this. Hopefully the last thing I’ll have to write any of these righteous, loving, dear, judgmental former longtime friends. Their need for attachment to each other, and identity in the group, has short circuited their ability to reason or be in the least bit objective, it would appear. I wrote:

Sure I’d like to remain friends, that’s why I sent you the best explanations I could write about my painful banishment from a group of lifelong friends based on these old friends all accepting the false narrative that I am the irrationally angry, unforgiving aggressor in the falling out with my “bosom buddy” and “the community that came with him”, as you put it.  I’m not looking for, or seeking to make, enemies, I’m looking for basic fairness from my friends, the same thing they rightfully expect from me.

You ask why I’m angry.   Look up “reactive abuse” online and you’ll get a taste of what I was subjected to for a year, before I finally saw what I was up against and took myself off the wheel of implacable mistreatment.  Is it really so mysterious that someone would be hurt that a group of his oldest friends would all assume that he is deluded by anger and that people who have lied about his actions are telling the truth?  That this innocent little cherem caused by an unresolvable conflict with two of the members is justified by how upset I seem to remain about it after total war was declared against me and blamed 100% on me?

Shocking, traumatic and difficult as it was to grasp that my two closest friends are unable to take responsibility for their actions or resolve conflicts and resort to making up and spreading an inflammatory story about my ongoing rage to justify their anger, my life is a hundred percent better without them in it.  To the extent it’s possible, in the times we are living in, I’m pretty much at peace with most things in my life, outside of a group of my oldest friends believing this kind of slander about my character, seemingly out of tribal loyalty to the prom king and queen from high school.  I’m almost over that too, though it’s taken a lot of painful work (such as writing the pages you read, without understanding anything but how much pain I was in).

I don’t need a judge, or a referee.  I appreciate that you wrote what you wrote out of a desire to help and will be talking to a dispassionate professional for the first session in a couple of hours.  What I needed from my old friends was just to be heard.   That was a lot to ask, apparently, and the united, principled voice of the group is like the voice of Switzerland circa 1942 — there is nothing to talk about here, we take no sides, we love and respect everybody, and if only you Gypsies, Jews and Reds would stop making such a racket we could all go on with our lives in peace.

If you read your original reply again you may understand why it struck me as so judgmental.  You’ll see that you concluded that I carry my childhood pain around like an albatross that encumbers all of my relationships (every one of them, apparently), leaving me friendless, and that my need to be right poisons my life (how would you know that one way or another?  was I vicious as I consoled your gentle brother during the shiva visit?  have you ever personally known me to be mean, or to lie, to anyone?) that I refuse to look at my own faults and have never done the hard work to overcome a painful childhood and become a better person, preferring to blame others and take petulant refuge in my “rightness”, as you chided me.  Again, how would you know any of that about me, except via a false story told by other hurt, angry one-time friends?  And how is any of that not a harsh moral judgment?  That it’s all based on lies my former closest friends have spread about me makes it worse still.

So you give me earnest, reasonable advice motivated by your deep concern and love for me, which just happens to accord with the common understanding of the group.  The innocent, stressed out X and the noble, persecuted Y have spread their story of my insane, unappeasable anger in our circle, and I’ve been repeatedly moralized to and now excluded from that intimate little group.  Everybody has made it clear to me, often indignantly, that they love me and they take no side, though they all clearly have (as your email indicated — pointing out very clearly that the real problem here seems to be my pathological need to cling to unresolved childhood pain, and my readiness to judgmentally hurt people who’ve done nothing to me but, uh, maybe judge me a tiny bit unfairly).  

I know a fatal falling out with Y and X would never happen to you, but can you imagine how it would feel if I — and everyone else we knew in common — told you it only happened because you’re immature and clinging to childhood pain?

Your friend (Redacted II) has been quite insistent, the two or three times I’ve spoken to her in the last six months, that I am the only one in the loving group who has a problem “forgiving”, a view echoed in your email.  Apparently, I’m insane to think the group has any opinion, has taken anyone’s side or has excluded me — and that I’ve only been excluded because I am so insanely angry that nobody wants to be around my crazy rage.  Again, see “reactive abuse”.   

I was hurt at being told, gently, firmly, every single time, with perfect moral uprightness, by everyone, the humanistic rabbi, Redacted II, you, silent V, silent W, before that X & Y themselves, to swallow what I feel happened to necessitate the painful end of a cherished, fifty year friendship that nobody but me could fix because the only thing wrong with it, apparently, is my own inability to forgive.  If I was upset, I had no right to be, it’s my problem alone, because I’m an angry baby who can’t face his own demons and just wants to inflict his pain on and try to change everybody else.   No moral judgment there?

A main feature of friendship is listening to a friend who is in pain, that box is conspicuously unchecked by my righteous old comrades.  By “taking no side” and requiring me to be quiet, and urging me to get professional help to look into my own heart for why I alone am so hurt to be harshly judged, the sides you all deny taking are drawn quite clearly.  With not one of you seemingly able to put yourself in my position for a moment to imagine how painful it is to be treated this way, or to extend to me the benefit of the doubt friends give each other, like I extended it to X and Y time after time while trying to work things out with them.

Here is the short description of friendship that X told me I’d used the wrong word in.  She said “you should have written ‘I’ instead of ‘you’.”  That observation was spontaneously made when I called to make amends with her, after a long WhatsApp negotiation, last August.      friendship

Here’s a quick one about how most of us tend to listen to people in pain, even if we don’t know them.     the human need to be heard

It’s one zen koan inside another.  We can’t forgive somebody who can’t forgive.  Your hurt and anger, Eliot, are both completely irrational, though we refuse to hear or consider any points you’re making because you’re so irrationally hurt and angry — from your childhood and completely unrelated to how you claim your two closest friends, people we all love dearly and unconditionally, may have treated you for more than a year during which you claim you consistently, patiently tried to make amends with them.  We don’t judge you for being a bitter, childish, angry, unforgiving, defensive, lying, other-blaming asshole, why do you judge us so harshly merely for being imperfect human friends?   

We are, every one of us, damaged in some ways by life, Redacted.  Some of us strive to be mensches and some just damage others and constantly justify it, while performing virtue and victimhood.  Responding to slanders about oneself does not make one the aggressor, unforgiving or obsessed with being ‘right’ at all costs.  Calculated lies about your character, and moral lectures based on those lies, from people who claim to love you, are intolerable, no matter how lovingly you’d like to spin it.  If you can’t see that after my several long explanations, I don’t know what to tell you.   Pass this email on to Zebediah, I guess, he may be able to be more objective.

Outside of that, as you say, zehu. (Hebrew for “that’s all” or “done”)