Category Archives: Ahimsa

In a place where there are no mensches, strive to be a mensch

A mensch is someone who strives to be honest, to keep their word, to do what they know is right, even if there is a price to be paid for right action. Real mensches are rare, we treasure them when we meet one, and, if we are decent, we try to live by the example they set. Jews are commanded “in a place where there are no mensches, strive to be a mensch”. So this is me, on the holiest day of the Jewish year, striving to be one.

I refrain from telling two longtime dear friends, too damaged by their own childhood trauma to refrain from assassinating my good name, that they are teaching their children a vicious and wrong lesson about life. I manfully avoid writing them and their family a note to ask: are you really teaching the three children you love that your own inability to deal with your pain, humiliation and rage entitles you to decide who they may love?

I would not be wrong to write those words, but I have to first consider if they would have any practical effect, if they could possibly improve anything between me and people who have decided I am dead because I was hurt by them and refused to simply shut up and pretend everything was as it always was, or as it always seemed to be.

My words would have no effect except to make two people already too humiliated to act with decency feel even more humiliated. It would increase their rage. It would harden their resolve to make sure the lid of my coffin is hammered tight shut and I remain, for all concerned, dead and silenced forever.

So, I am reduced to thinking these dour thoughts and writing those words here, as we all fast and consider our good and bad acts of the previous year, and who we still need to make amends with. I strive to be a mensch, and they have long avoided reading anything I post here, so there is little chance of them ever reading this. Still, there’s a chance they might. If they do, call me pisher.

Happy Erev Yom Kippur, y’all

Tonight is considered the beginning of the holiest day of the Jewish year. New Years 5784 was nine days ago. Tomorrow dawns as Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the tenth and final day to make amends with people we’ve hurt before the Big Guy upstairs closes the Book of Life, after reviewing our deeds and inscribing our fate for the year. He seals the book at the very last moment of Yom Kippur, a day of fasting and praying, before everybody in temples everywhere rushes home to break the fast.

This Book of Life is a poetic conceit from hundreds of years ago when it was conceivable, in a preliterate age, that an actual Creator of the universe, with a long white beard, sat on a heavenly throne and personally looked over everyone’s deeds (in the manner of Santa, now that I think of it) paging through a gigantic accounting book with a page for every human. Depending on the humility, honesty and goodness of each, the Holy One wrote out the indelible karma of each person for the following year.

Down here in the world of free will and dirty human affairs, even the most disinterested Jew pays at least some attention to Yom Kippur. Sandy Koufax, a completely secular Jew, famously sat out a World Series start that fell on Yom Kippur. After Koufax shut the Yankees down the following day, Mickey Mantle asked his teammates if there wasn’t maybe another “Yom Koufax” before the end of the Series.

Personally, I don’t give a rat’s ass for the rituals of my religion but I take its moral values seriously. I take the main theme of Yom Kippur seriously — I try my best to make amends with those I’ve hurt, extend forgiveness to those who ask me for it. I always fast on Yom Kippur, along with millions of Jews, religious and secular, worldwide. My rationale for fasting is that with so many billions hungry every day, many starving to death, I should be ashamed if I can’t go without food for one twenty-four hour period every year.

There is an extra chill to solemn Yom Kippur for me this year. The group of old friends, who always gather to break the fast together, the place we’ve gone every year for thirty years, has made it clear, after we narrowly got a last minute invite last year, that I am fucking dead to all of them and to their children. DEAD. No conversation is possible with a stinking cadaver, which is what I am to them, their friends and their children. Nothing this accursed zombie has to say can be heard, according to the ancient, sacred doctrine of “I know you are, but what am I?”

One among them, a long time good friend of ours, was recently diagnosed with stage four cancer. My gestures of friendship are awkward, I was told, my tears are not welcome at his funeral, unless I heal the damage I’ve somehow done to two people too damaged to acknowledge their own destructiveness, and to the rest of the group, also unforgivably hurt on their behalf. Don’t I understand how excruciatingly painful it is to everyone for me to stubbornly refuse to pretend that none of the destructive behavior they reflexively engage in ever happened?!! Apparently not.

Hopefully the implacable, perfect First Couple’s first born is out of the psychiatric ward and doing much better now. Hopefully my old friend with the terrifying prognosis will get some blessed medical news. Hopefully the good thoughts of a dead man will be taken to heart by an imaginary all-powerful, all-merciful, infinitely just and loving Big Guy as He hunches over the gigantic Book of Life tonight and tomorrow, making His final notations, before He seals everyone’s fate for the year.

May you be inscribed and sealed in the Book of Life for the year you deserve, y’all.

The duty to do the right thing

Your righteous anger, your pride, the terrifying depths of your crippling childhood injuries, does not relieve you of your duty to do the right thing toward people you care about. Anyone who is not a psychopath knows the difference between right and wrong, though this line is easily colored over by strong emotions and righteous group think.

You can find yourself at the end of a once beautiful relationship, with no further obligation to endure what has soured into mutual contempt. That happens between humans sometimes, it is impossible to unsee contempt once it is shown to you by someone you trusted. This is very sad but sometimes, in human affairs, as inevitable as death itself.

Once you feel contempt directed at you from someone you love and trust, the hurt and betrayal you feel is usually transmitted right back to them. Faults you have long overlooked in your dear loved one transform into unresolvable obstacles to love, as do your faults to them. It is difficult to keep feeling generous toward someone who treats you with contempt. Once this transition happens, the odds are very low of overcoming it and restoring the relationship to what it was before mutual hurt corrupted it.

Finding ourselves at an ugly juncture with loved ones who hurt us does not relieve us of our obligation to act in the way we know is right. The hopelessness of a situation, until it is revealed without any further doubt — like when the Nazis began machine gunning Jews who showed them their humanity and soul power, as Gandhi advised them to do — does not change your moral obligation to do what you know is right, to refrain from doing what is hateful to you. It is OK to kill a Nazi who is trying to kill you, to defend your life and your loved ones from Nazis, once the killing starts, it is even praiseworthy to do so. It is never OK to become a Nazi.

The human dilemma, how to continue to act attuned to your higher nature when you are suddenly thrashing in a toxic sea of the lowest human impulses. There’s a riddle that will keep an honest person awake at night, especially during the ten days when we are commanded to make amends with those we have hurt and with those who have injured us.

From Chapter 42

So I can only take the lesson from other people I have loved who, I find out in the end, can never be wrong. They all lash out the same way when they feel defensive, they will effectively kill you to prove that they can never be wrong. Once you’re dead you have to finally shut the hell up, they don’t have to listen to another mortifying word.

I don’t know what it is with this type. Actually, I do. It’s irreparable, traumatic damage done to them early and persistently, disabling them so badly that they cling to a fragile belief in their superiority and are compelled to destroy whenever their projected virtue feels threatened. This type also, of course, is very easily threatened.

They understand the world as black and white, win-lose, zero sum.  They resonate with other winners who are easily threatened, and they band together with them. They all intuitively grasp the basic rules and boundaries — when threatened, they form a herd and protect each other because they’re all the same kind of animal. They understand the extreme dangerousness of life, the finality of rage, the importance of social status, the limitations of love, trust and friendship in the same way, and they love, trust and befriend each other in the same conditional way.

I have known a bunch of this type, and it’s taken me sixty-seven years to recognize the infernal consistency of this tribe they are all perfect examples of. You don’t want to be on the wrong side of their predictable moral certainty, when the time inevitably comes, trust me. 

Don’t get me wrong

Please don’t misunderstand.   I try my best to live by my understanding of Ahimsa, non-harm.    I wish more people did this.   I do my best to remain mild and to pause, and think, before I react.   I try to listen and help when I can.  When I can’t help, I try not to hurt.

But I come from, and live in, a toxicly competitive society.  My father was, in his own humble way, a monster.  He conformed to a monstrous system trying to gain the respect and dignity it was impossible for someone with his tragic history of trauma to find on his own.  I had my share of hard knocks, as most of us do.  I dropped as far out of this sickening competition for everything as I dared to.   So, the rage is definitely baked in there, baby, though I live my life mindful of keeping my temper under control and directing it where it actually belongs.  (Computers, phones, robots and any other AI-type corporate technology that fucks me notwithstanding).

Meaning, I give everyone the benefit of the doubt, but I am capable of the same violence everyone else is.

Those who love me, people I’ve known for years, get a bit more of my benefit of the doubt than strangers.   But, if you keep doing the same hurtful thing, and when I ask for mercy you try to make it my problem, eventually, I will, figuratively, break your fucking face for you.   

A few kicks in the balls over the course of many years can be an accident, unless an inviolable pattern emerges.  Instead of an apology, every time I double over you express disgust that I keep making such an issue of your completely unintentional mistake?  

Nah, now I have to make your big nose bleed and you can go cry a river to someone who cares.

Then, back to Ahimsa for me.  

Nice insight from Bessel van der Kolk

how’s this for an insight?

integrating  traumatic memories [as opposed to blocking them out]

“People cannot put traumatic events  behind until they are able to acknowledge what happened and start to recognize the invisible demons they are struggling with.”

Too painful for those who can never be wrong to do this, so the trauma can never be understood or dealt with.  They can’t feel or digest the harm they’ve suffered, or face the damage done to them, so they create a superhuman facade and do all the grim things I’ve become so aware of the last few years. They forge this admirable image of strength and solidity to protect their imagined perfection in front of others. Their only other choice, they fear, is utter humiliation. The vulnerability necessary for growth is not an option for them.

The importance of connection to others in preventing (and healing from) trauma

From an amazing, insightful book, The Body Keeps the Score, by psychiatrist and pioneer of trauma treatment, Bessel van der Kolk.

I’m listening at 1.25 speed because it’s due back at the library very soon and I waited months along with many others to get this audio book. Will be buying a copy to review. I recommend this book very highly.

This section, the beginning of part five, leaped out at me — a trusting connection with calm loved ones is indispensable for preventing (and healing from) trauma. It’s intuitive and hard to deny once you hear Bessel lay it out. This captures a lot of the misery of the world in about two minutes, and points the way towards its resolution.

Turning a therapeutic corner

Comedy, it has been said, is tragedy plus time, giving rise to Gilbert Gottfried’s immortal “too soon?” as he embarked on a tasteless, but hilarious joke, shortly after the 9/11 atrocity. I don’t necessarily see the profundity of that observation about comedy (is it inevitably a riff on tragedy?), but there is something undeniably helpful about the passage of time to aid in the old perspective. Without some temporal distance from something that gives you pain, it feels impossible, while smarting, that you will ever begin to heal from the wound.

Then, as I have noticed as weeks passed, whenever things were the worst for me, with enough time passed you start to emerge from the wreckage. You can see things better once the smoke, and dust, and poisonous gas have settled, it has rained a few times, clearing the air a bit, once you’ve thought about and talked through things with smart people you trust. The pain begins to diminish, to fade into the past. It seems to me that gaining clarity about the cause of your pain, and having a good sounding board or two, are immensely helpful in this healing process, but I think it happens naturally, to some extent, with the simple passing of enough time. This is particularly true in the case of loss.

It is unthinkable, while the wound is fresh, that you will ever not be in agony, ever find the emotional distance you need to calmly understand what you need to do to heal. Once healing starts, baby, you’re on your way to greater understanding of life in general. You learn that there are some hellish things you just can’t fix. Life goes on. You will be fine.

Two basic orientations toward our fellow creatures

(from Chapter 36 of The Intimate Lynch Mob)

There are two basic orientations toward our fellow creatures available to us, open or closed, predisposed toward healing or harming. We can behave with openness and vulnerability or protecting ourselves, projecting strength and a determination to never be hurt. We have a reflex toward healing, ourselves and those we care about, or protecting ourselves at all costs, even if it means harming others.

We can listen with patience, and react honestly, or close ourselves off, secretive, foreclosing dialogue and remaining protected, even if it means being dishonest and causing damage to others. To the latter type, the reflex to dishonesty is no vice because the stakes are your precious heart and soul, the essence of every sentient creature’s being.

To those oriented toward repelling threat, every bit of energy will be directed toward self-protection. Vulnerability is seen as weakness, contemptibly pathetic and even suicidal in an infinitely dangerous high stakes contest for dignity where only the strongest prevail.

To me, and pussies like me, the only prize truly worth having is someone you love feeling safe enough to make themselves vulnerable, because they know that the first instinct of your love will always be to protect them.

Then again, consider the source. This is coming from the insane bastard who sadistically tortured his best friend for over a year and refused to forgive him for some unspecified imaginary crime, so take it with a few grains of salt, eh?

Insecurity on steroids

The thing with someone who can never acknowledge they were wrong, or behaved hurtfully, is that it comes from a terrible insecurity. We all have insecurities, it is part of the human condition to wonder and compare yourself to an ideal you have of how you should be able to act in the world. People who can’t be wrong live in a different world than the rest of us fallible earthlings.

If you admit you’ve hurt somebody, it makes you a bad person, in their crabbed, black and white worldview. People who hurt others are bad, they need to be perfect, so it is impossible that they could have hurt someone without a very good reason. That reason is always the same: “that person who claims I hurt them, that liar, actually hurt me, really, really badly. I am the victim, not them! How dare that morbidly oversensitive defective attack my perfection, and expect me not to react!”

“I was only reacting, like any normal person would, reflexes got the best of me. You made me shoot you in the gut, because I was rightfully afraid you were going to attack me. You didn’t see that terrifying look on your face, I had to stand my ground. Everyone has a right to self-defense, that’s all I was doing when I shot you a few more times just to make sure you couldn’t get up and beat the living crap out of me, pistol whip me with my own gun. Don’t pretend that’s not exactly what you were thinking as you were lying there, fake bleeding!”

In my personal life I’ve recently experienced this insecurity on steroids, in my face so constantly I had to grapple with the underlying principle of how these emotionally driven motherfuckers truly believe they are acting righteously. Coming from a loved one, someone you’ve long trusted, it really fucks with your mind. A person who is sometimes wrong, who apologizes from time to time, cannot understand that for someone with crippling insecurity these simple human acts are impossible. The logic is not hard to understand, once you grasp the basic principle.

I am so insecure that any criticism or complaint against me is a deadly attack. I cannot be wrong, because everyone loves and respects me. I am an exemplary person. I will not be attacked by people with mental problems. You are insane if you don’t understand that you are wrong and I am right, no matter what.

You can’t reason with these good folks, they are beyond the reach of introspection, empathy or the ability to see nuance or take responsibility for the harm we all sometimes do to others. All they see is deadly threat, competition to the death and victory. Once you realize this about them, how paralyzed they are by insecurity and anger (which hardens immediately into implacable rage) during even the most minor conflict, the only thing you can do to preserve your integrity (and what’s left of your sanity) is follow the advice of the second best fortune cookie I ever opened:

The best throw of the dice is to throw them away.