Category Archives: Ahimsa

The longing for closure

Maybe it’s just something Hollywood movies instill in us when we’re young — the idea that we can have real emotional closure, a dramatic, satisfying, healing ending to even an unbearably tragic series of events. I think of this in terms of my own life and the life of our experiment in democracy. I will focus on the second one, on this day before Election Day.

We can, as a democratic nation, repudiate the forces that are determined to control everyone based on the insatiable greed of a privileged few and, in service to their huge Christian evangelical voting block, impose perverted religious views on everyone. A girl who is raped, her trauma multiplied when she discovers she’s pregnant, has less rights than the rapist’s six week and one day old fetus, according to these twisted lovers of a funhouse mirror version of Jesus. Destroying the planet with unregulatable pollution is the right of those with the power to do so, if it will make them the world’s first trillionaires, because — freedom. Hoarders of obscene wealth are admired while those living in intergenerational poverty are reviled as parasitic “losers” who didn’t have the sense to be born to wealthy families.

Let’s say Harris wins by 20,000,000 votes (she should), and wins the accursed Electoral College, her party takes the Senate and the House, and MAGA’s attempts to overturn the results, including the cherub faced soulless fanatic from Louisiana’s “secret plan” to nullify the results, a rash of riots across the country and frantic appeals to Scalia’s evil spawn on the Supreme Court, fail to install Trumpie as president for life.

It would be a great relief to at least 180 million Americans to have a president who doesn’t spout endless lies, launch hourly, bullying attacks on countless “sick”, “dangerous” “enemies”, conduct secret talks with dictators and war criminals and unleash hate speech addressed toward entire groups of “the enemy within” while constantly threatening violence. It would be excellent to live under an administration that actually has reality-based positions and an agenda to make things better, instead of the far-right’s enforced loyalty to a figurehead deranged in his anger and drunk on fantasies of deadly revenge. Would a resounding Trump defeat be closure? No, but it would be a very good start.

Closure comes only when a sense of fairness is restored, the widening chasm between the top 1% and everyone else is closed. Powerful criminal conspirators get prosecuted alongside the hapless, violent foot soldiers they unleash. A treason preaching former general is recalled to active duty and dishonorably discharged, his pension cancelled. Bullying and abuse become the subjects of serious cultural scrutiny and national dialogue. The wealthiest citizens and corporations are required to pay their fair share of taxes. A living wage is guaranteed to all workers by federal law. Police violence is curbed, use of excessive, often deadly, force is not shielded by “qualified immunity”. Gun violence is curbed by regulating who can own firearms and when they may be reasonably restricted. The Supreme Court is recalibrated, with term limits, a strict, enforceable ethics code, the addition of several non-partisan justices who don’t belong to an orthodox far-right judicial fraternity. The right to vote is once again protected by law, as are women’s rights, healthcare, and civil rights of all kinds.

Partisanship in drawing gerrymandered districts to consolidate minority power is ruled as unconstitutional as nakedly racist gerrymandering. Serious care is given to solving the existential, rapidly accelerating climate crisis mankind, and all of the creatures of the earth, are facing. Norms of civil society are restored, and codified into democracy-protecting law, where necessary. Hatred of minorities, and baseless attacks on judges and other public officials, may no longer be preached by elected officials with impunity. The fairness doctrine is restored for mass media news reporting, including fact-checking for social media. The filibuster, that relic of human slavery, is ended, along with the Electoral College. Democratic debate on issues of public importance returns, in a robust and meaningful way.

These things would be a good start to real closure on our Age of Raging Narcissism and the rule of the angriest and most corrupt among us. We have more things that unite us, more common goals, than the things that are used to divide us.

Maybe I’m just primed by Hollywood, and the human longing to see justice, but that kind of closure seems entirely reasonable to me. With communication, conversation, an ability to listen and make oneself heard and understood, closure is possible. The problem is the millions among us who cannot communicate, except on their strict terms, and who are able to listen only until they feel violated (and they’re hypersensitive to this feeling), at which point they respond the only way they know how. That way of responding never leads to closure, and, to my eternal disappointment, it is still hard for me to get closure about the fact that closure will often be impossible.

Sorry for that lack of closure, here, I truly am. Even as I am hopeful for a good result in the election between an insane agent of eternal grievance and senseless retribution (and the 39 year-old, self-righteous psychopath who will be installed as soon as the figurehead is taken out of the picture by their handlers) and flawed, human, well-intentioned public servants who will earnestly address actual problems and don’t aspire to lead a Nazi-like national cult and rain violent repression down on the meek and helpless.

I can dream, can’t I?  But, of course, the main thing at the moment is heading off the worst case scenario.  Talk about a bad dream.

God says slavery is righteous

Fascist constantly calling his opponent a fascist, complains about being compared to fascists by his sick, evil, stupid opponent

A fascist is a certain type of leader: authoritarian, top of the hierarchy of strict obedience to orders, surrounded by those who take an oath of personal loyalty to him, ruthlessly repressing dissent, threatening and controlling all professions and the mass media, spouting divisive lies, using the force of the state to terrify and punish enemies, and its treasury to reward wealthy friends and patrons.

All of these things Donald Trump has done, or tried to do, during his first term in office. Even now, we don’t know the full extent of his crimes regarding a trove of illegally retained classified military secrets and his ongoing post-presidential negotiations with his handler/blackmailer, renowned war criminal and buddy of Elon Musk, Vladimir Putin.

In attacking his opponent Kamala Harris, in addition to the usual dog whistles to the Klan and Nazi contingent of his base, and millions of ordinary misogynists, Trump routinely calls her a radical left, Marxist, communist, fascist. In the country Trump’s family comes from Marxists and Fascists were fighting deadly battles in the streets less than twenty years before Trumpie was born.

No fascist can be a Marxist and vice versa. Only someone intent on name-calling, inspiring maximum loathing and ignorant of, or careless about, the meaning of the words he uses, would call a communist a fascist. They can both be totalitarians, authoritarians, but calling Harris a communist fascist is like saying she’s a cat dog (both delicious, by the way, people are saying, the weave, am I right? I’m right, aren’t I?).

Personally, I blame advertising for the distraction and credulity of Americans.  Our attention spans are shattered at an early age by the constant bombardment of commercial messages, attention grabbing non sequiturs which we often tune out even as they interrupt whatever we were thinking about a second before.  Watch any video on YouTube and, precisely as the video tees up the pay-off, the money quote, the volume jumps and some shill is excitedly shouting over loud music.  They are shouting about something completely unrelated to what you were interested in, focused on a second earlier, but not a problem.  In America these interruptions are simply an inescapable feature of the marketplace of ideas, just as valid as  anything else in a society whose only real value is monetary profit.   Everyone understands the profit motive, no?

So you get to vote for a presidential candidate/huckster who lies compulsively, is ignorant about history, incurious about the present and almost everything else, a businessman who started with a small $400,000,000 nest egg from his father and failed in every business venture he started, declaring bankruptcy six times, while touting himself as the greatest business genius of all time, as seen on TV. He knows how the game is played, so he can mock his opponent, call her any name he likes, literally throw shit at her.

Here’s the unfunny punchline: when she is asked whether she agrees with two of his former generals and his former secretary of defense that he is indeed a fascist (it’s virtually impossible to make an informed argument that he’s not) and she says she does, Trump screams bloody murder that she’s name-calling. Every fascist in history has done that, as have many communist dictators, although dogs and cats (equally tasty when prepared well, many people are saying, see that skillful weave I’m doing?) rarely do.

“How dare that nasty, low IQ, brown son of a bitch who doesn’t know if she’s Black or Indian, or Malaysian, or Samoan, or even a human being, call me a name I already call her?” 

In his rage the other night he fantasized to replacement theory promoter Tucker Carlson about disloyal war monger Liz Cheney not being so brave if she had a rifle and was looking down the barrels of nine rifles pointed at her head.   The New York Times did mention this threat in today’s edition, but carefully, with plenty of respectful nuance (they don’t want to face down the barrel of nine automatic weapons).  The Washington Post (spineless puto-owned) presumably also gave a balanced portrait of the candidate’s understandable bad mood as he uttered his arguably well-veiled, deniable threat to Tucker Carlson, a craven lying toady who cackles like a startled school girl.  As Tuckems said the other day at the beautiful Madison Square Garden love fest that had not a hint of the 1939 Nazi rally held there (I got the proof for you right here):

“He’s liberated us in the deepest and truest sense,” Carlson said. “And the liberation he has brought to us is the liberation from the obligation to tell lies. Donald Trump has made it possible for the rest of us to tell the truth about the world around us.”

A far cry from Tucker’s January 6th tweets about Trump being a demonic force and talking about how much he hates the sore loser Orange Fraud.  Tucker has always shown an almost Jeff Bezos-like level of personal integrity (see, for example, his recent infomercial for Vlad Putin in a Russian supermarket).

Ah, fuck those lying, name-calling, thin-skinned, transactionally pearl clutching, fainting couch humping, fascist fucking crybaby putos.  Better to see exactly how fucked Mr. Musk will be if Trumpie loses the election and can’t get his goons to overturn the results.

Shame drives the bus

“All violence,” says psychiatrist James Gilligan, after years working with violent inmates in American prisons, “is an attempt to replace shame with self-esteem.” Fear of shame drives all kinds of extreme, harmful behavior.

Self-delusion is another adaptation to fear of shame. “I could not have lost, because I am a winner and winners never lose. So-called reality is conspiring against me because it is jealous and it fears me, and rightfully so. I will destroy so-called reality and all the feeble cucks who try to cite facts as though they are more real than my feelings. Nothing is more real than my feelings, they rule the universe!”

Give someone like this power over others (and they often crave it as the only way to feel safe from a feeling of worthlessness) and hold on to your seat. The driver is now a hostage and a lunatic is at the wheel with only one goal — never to feel the traumatic agony of his shame again. If it takes driving off a cliff to prove he’s fearless, not a problem to someone hellbent on outrunning the terror of shame, failure, a paralyzing fear of utter worthlessness.

We have been watching this struggle play out in public for the last nine years. It is playing 24/7 at the moment in a party that must swear loyalty to a debasing lie about a lost election that was, like the Civil War, never lost, but stolen. This power dynamic has always operated behind the scenes, in throne rooms, corporate boardrooms, courtrooms and behind closed doors, but now the agents of this divisive, controlling rage have their perfect front man. He has no filter, will say and do absolutely anything, and insist on his perfect right to whatever he feels he must say or do. No human laws can stop him, he is superhuman, magical in his powers to overcome reality itself.

To my great personal sorrow, I had a painfully close front row seat to the highly personalized version of this dynamic a few years ago. My closest, most trusted friends, people I’d known and counted on for fifty years, all sneered angrily at me from the windows of a bus driven by one of these unleashed fucking maniacs. There was no appealing to their humanity, to our long friendships, to our actual experiences of each other over decades. They were united in their sudden certainty that I deserved only their united contempt and eternal anger for my stubborn refusal to take responsibility for willfully and singlehandedly destroying the happiness of a group of lifelong friends. The best formulation I got for my permanent expulsion from this close social circle was a demented “we can never forgive you for not being able to forgive.”

The lesson I was forced to learn was an extremely harsh one. In certain circumstances, a popular person can quickly and easily convince all the other kindergarteners in the schoolyard that you have cooties. Cooties are highly contagious. If you go near Cootie-boy you will have cooties and that will be the end of you, too. Life, my little five year-old friends, is a binary choice, always. You choose black or you choose white. In a shame-based world there are no other options, no nuance, no gradation, no possibility of EVER working out any problem with a loved one that might make their shame rear its monstrous head for them.

Therapy doesn’t work with these creatures, although often everyone around them, not as strong and self-sufficient as the shame-based charismatic, will seek therapy. To begin to change anything about yourself that causes you pain you must be able to look at faults in yourself, your reflexive reactions that often lead to misery. The idea of honestly looking at their own faults is terrifying to someone whose entire personality and worldview is based on never again being traumatized by shame. They will not do it. Nothing bad can ever be their fault in any way, that’s the inhuman rule these poor bastards live by.

Poor bastards or not, they can’t be negotiated with, persuaded or made more empathetic. They cannot change in any significant way, because of the particular nature of their damage. They are doomed to their fate, but we are not. We can be polite to them, speak calmly with them, but they can’t be counted on for anything besides their own self-preservation. Horrible but not uncommon, the worst feature of their affliction is their ability to convince others of their magical worldview.

Catastrophizing Conflict

Most humans have a deeply wired impulse to avoid conflict. Many people, particularly if they are raised by angry or unstable parents, grow up fearing the worst whenever they find themselves in any kind of conflict. To those raised in an embattled home, perceived conflict, and the fear, anger and other startling emotions it inspires, becomes an emotional emergency, to be immediately talked out with the other party. Addressing conflict when you are upset, before you have digested everything involved in the conflict, is a crappy recipe for conflict resolution.

It’s natural, if you were accosted by unreasoning anger over and over in childhood, to assume that if someone seems mad at you it could be the end of a relationship you value. In the home you grew up in, everything was always phrased that way. You were conditioned to respond defensively, meekly, self-denyingly, by long years of this demand that anger is always your fault. “You crossed me again, you little shit, and maybe this time will be the last time I take that shit from you. I brought you into the world, I have the perfect legal right to take you out of it, applicable murder statutes notwithstanding.” At four years-old, about all you can do is blink and try not to cry.

It is hard, very important, work to separate the cause of the conflict from the most dire emotional outcome you can imagine. It’s important to be able to sit with the uncomfortable feelings, fear of catastrophe, until you have a handle on them, are able to consider, and talk about, the situation calmly. The only thing that makes it an emergency to deal with now, now, now! is in your catastrophizing soul.

A conflict may turn out to be very simple to solve. Someone told me they feel under pressure because I respond to emails within a day of when I get them while it takes him/her/them at least ten days to reply. I described a feature on gmail that allows you to schedule when an email is sent. I write back tomorrow, schedule send for ten days later. Your feelings understood, technology to the rescue, problem solved. Easy.

Underlying conflicts that should be very simple to resolve, assuming good will and ability on both sides, is the vast, bottomless swamp of our emotional needs, many of which are unknown and/or disorienting to us. There are some people whose dread of feeling responsible for ever hurting anyone makes them go to ridiculous, sometimes highly antagonistic, lengths to explain why, since they had absolutely no intention of hurting you, you are clearly wrong for feeling hurt by what they did, which was the exact opposite, intentionally, of what you said hurt you. So you are actually hurting them, really unfairly and aggressively, for expressing your hurt feelings when they can explain all the reasons, in exhaustive detail, that you’re completly wrong to feel hurt by what they clearly didn’t mean to do.

It can literally make your head explode, dealing with these relentless characters. In another life, not long ago, I’d have referred to them as relentless motherfuckers, which is as accurate, maybe more so. Characters can be entertaining, endearing even in their limitations and faults. Motherfuckers can only do one thing, which makes their relentlessness something to avoid. You can’t reason with them, they can’t necessarily dance (in fact, they almost never can) but will insist on dancing to the end of endurance if it suits their larger purpose: never to be wrong no matter what.

It takes a long time, in my case more than sixty-five years, but the understanding that it’s literally impossible to resolve conflict (no matter how insignificant) with a relentless motherfucker is probably the single most important thing I’ve ever learned. I pass it on to you to consider, free of charge.

Why lying works for psychopaths

People want to feel right, righteous, on the side of good and standing firmly against evil. This impulse to be on the side of good is deeply wired into most of us. If we believe someone is a monster, we recoil from them, marginalize them, want to see them gone. It is this human desire for righteousness that the greatest liars exploit. It feels good to be right, and if a well-placed lie makes you feel more righteous than the complicated, sometimes difficult, truth, what is the real harm in that?

We see the power of determined, shameless liars’ use of incendiary lies, designed to produce righteous anger and persuade people to follow them, in politics every minute of every day. It works perfectly to persuade millions of the righteousness of an objectively rotten cause and it works equally well among much smaller groups. There is no group too small for this principle to work in. Here is a personal example.

I had a small, almost senseless conflict with a dear friend of fifty years. It was over, literally, nothing. Hearing the actual details, few would be able to figure out how this stupid impasse was not worked out easily between old friends, how it became a fatal fault line. In hindsight, this woman who insists on being in charge had been spoiling for this final fight for a while. Given the opportunity to righteously rage, she glared at me with silent hostility, refused to speak, letting her implacably fierce stare speak for itself.

I offered compromises, proposed solutions, her husband tried to explain her irrational objections which she refused to address herself. She remained silent and glared a laser beam of hostility at me, before snarling her final refusal of even a small compromise as she closed the door behind her for the night.

In the end, because I could not accept that my “defiance” had completely justified her totally understandable rage, I had to be destroyed. I’d seen a humiliating weakness in a person with an outsized need never to be wrong. Since she does not possess first class tools to make her case persuasively, she resorts to emotional terrorism, a very effective form of control, as I would learn. She is well-known for her willfulness, her need to be obeyed, to have the final word on everything from which restaurant everyone goes to to what topics may be discussed at dinner.

How did she convince everyone else in our group of longtime friends, and their entire families, that I was suddenly the incarnation of Adolf Hitler? She told them that rather than trying to make peace for a year, I’d spent a full year relentlessly torturing her husband, my closest friend, to “bend him to my will.” To my amazement, the reality that I’ve never tried to bend anyone to my will, readily apologize when I know I’ve hurt somebody, am always ready to compromise rather than fight, was completely disregarded by people who’d known us both well for fifty years. She bent everyone to her will with conscious lies, repeated with enough passion to convince a group of my oldest friends that I was toxic, a person to be shunned unto the death.

When I see JD Vance bristle that the CBS moderators are fucking liars because they promised not to fact check his lies at a debate where he lied over and over, when I see trump’s sphincter of a mouth move, his angry petulance when asked a question he takes offense to, I see my former dear friend. Not everyone will immediately lie when they feel themselves under stress, or challenged. Every one of these desperate people who can never be wrong will lie exactly the same way whenever they feel under pressure. They will do whatever is necessary to bend others to their perverse will to control the people around them.

That the angriest, most insecure, insane, mendacious pieces of shit in the world often have the final say in human affairs is a horrifying tragedy. Netanyahu and his perverted Jewish fundamentalist extremists vs. Hamas and their perverted Muslim fundamentalists extremists get the last word about whether millions of peace loving people in Israel/Palestine will live quiet lives of hope or suffer gruesome, endless warfare and death. Trump and his billionaire handlers currently decide whether millions of Americans live in fear and rage, and resort to deadly violence, or come together to peacefully work out our common problems.

Sadly for humanity, sick motherfuckers very often get the last word. Look at fucking Elon Musk, Stephen Miller, Ginni Thomas, cherub-faced fanatic MAGA Mike Johnson and the rest of their stinking divisive, constantly aggrieved ilk. Every one of them righteous as hell in their own mind and intent on convincing others they’re on the side of the angels, resolute in their determination to exterminate all demons. As it is written: fuck those fucking putos.

The infinite sorrow of humanity

This evening, at sundown, all over the world Jews will begin their Yom Kippur fast, which is broken tomorrow night, after a long, mournful bleat on a ram’s horn, when it is dark enough for stars to be visible in the sky.

Most don’t have any real sense of why they are fasting, but it is a sacred tradition that even many secular Jews follow every year. I do it myself, though not because I feel like I’m impressing an all-loving, all-merciful, all-seeing Creator with this penitent act of self-denial. If I can’t be slightly hungry one day a year, when billions of our fellow humans live with painful hunger regularly, am I even human?

The sorrow comes in for me because everybody, with the exception of a few gleeful sociopaths, I suppose, wants to feel they are decent people, doing the right thing, living a life that helps others more than it hurts them. We want this feeling always, no matter how badly we may act, no matter what hurt we may cause others, we all need to believe in our own righteousness. We all like to imagine we’d jump into a river to save a drowning child. We admire those who do, and wish we could be like them if we realize we aren’t brave enough (or good enough swimmers). We have high ideals and believe that we always live by them.

Most people, I think, have known people we can no longer have in our lives. Conflicts arise, and if only one person has the desire and the ability to calmly discuss and resolve conflict, the conflict inevitably becomes final, fatal to love and friendship. It is possible to remain in a conflict-plagued relationship, without hope of improvement, but I’ve learned it is much better to move past that particular heartache and learn an important life lesson from it.

There are some people who reveal an ugly side of themselves, often at the worst time for you, that you cannot unsee. It’s human nature to make excuses for that person, if we love them, but once an ugly pattern emerges, usually with an insistence that only you are to blame for any bad feelings, wishful hoping will not change the person you are making excuses for or your relationship with them.

Just because you love dogs, and dream of having an affectionate lapdog, that love doesn’t turn the fish struggling in your lap into a dog.  The fish will always die, no matter how many beautiful, friendly fish you try this with.

I had a childhood friend I haven’t seen for many years at this point. He calls periodically and we speak calmly about things in our lives. The reason we don’t see each other anymore is that in spite of provoking me to anger every time we met, for years, he refused to acknowledge this, instead insisting that I have a problem with my temper. We all have a problem when we lose our temper, but that is another story. We do not all provoke our closest friend every time we get together with them. We also don’t all reflexively fight to deny that we are doing anything bad to anybody, ever.

I urged him several times over the years, if you hear me start to get upset, raise my voice, you see my muscles tense, my face redden, pump the brakes and let’s change the subject for a while. He doesn’t know how to do this. It’s not his problem. It is mine. So, in the end I did what I needed to do not to be provoked by someone who can’t help himself. I stopped pretending this handsome fish was a cuddly lapdog.

He is, sadly, unable to view his actions, and the actions of others, with the same clarity.  To him we are still friends, somehow, because I take his calls and we talk on the phone once in a while.  I always like talking to people, it is one of my favorite things to do.  I like comparing notes on what we’ve learned over our aging lives.  He listens as I recite hard lessons I’ve had to learn.  This makes him feel close to me, that I am always honest with him, and talk in a relaxed, nonjudgmental way.  I don’t mind talking to him, but that’s a much different thing than us being friends.

Friends comfort each other during painful times. Friends ask good questions when they don’t understand something. Friends extend the benefit of the doubt when the other one is off kilter, gently find out what’s wrong, how they can help. Friends accept responsibility when they hurt their friend. Friends make sure that ill-feelings do not fester in their dear ones. Friends are responsive, and honest, when a friend expresses unhappiness with the way things are. Not all friendships can always be saved, though some can. No friendship can be saved if one friend is always blamed for any conflict, unless the blamed person is a masochist.

If I tell you a sad story of death, with a hard lesson I reluctantly had to learn, and you reply that it was a beautiful story of life, with an inspiring lesson that is the opposite of the lesson I described, what can I possibly say, without being dishonest, that will make us friends again?

Days of Awe

Days of Awe Yom Kippur 5785

Please rise.

In ancient times, as the days grew notably shorter, darkness appeared earlier and earlier and the nights turned cold, people fearfully began to pray. A hundred variations of “oh, Lord, please don’t destroy us!” were recited across the land, by trembling crowds presided over by priests who led them in rituals.

In Judaism these rapidly shortening days mark New Years and, ten days later, after the Days of Awe, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The tradition is that as night falls on Yom Kippur, God closes the immense Book of Life, where He (They, actually, God is commonly referred to in the plural, Elohim) has recorded the fate of every human for the following year, according to our deeds.

During the Ten Days of Repentance, the period between New Years and Yom Kipuur, Jews are commanded to make amends with people we’ve hurt, repay debts, make peace, atone for bad things we’ve done, forgive those who sincerely seek our forgiveness, straighten out misunderstandings, right any wrongs in our power to right. The sages teach that you must try to make amends with someone three times before you can abandon the process.

Sadly, in a world where the best teachings of every religion are not always faithfully carried out, not all Jews follow this exemplary practice, even once. I would estimate that most do not exert themselves to make amends, though many fast and pray to God, rising and being seated over and over as the pages of the Yom Kippur prayer book are turned.

Any Jew who dons white clothes, fasts and fervently prays, without taking a serious moral inventory of their own actions during these days, without approaching people they’ve hurt to make amends, is, to my mind, a sorry, sanctimonious sack.

I find myself thinking about a couple of my long time close friends, universally admired sacks, in the days leading up to another Yom Kippur, high holy day of the righteous and unbearable hypocrite alike.

My closest friend of many years, whose angry wife demanded no discussion of an ugly conflict we’d had, met me for lunch a few days before Yom Kippur two years ago so that we could try to make amends before the Big Guy closed the Book. This Jew who prays every morning became indignant when I got serious and came to the point, told me I’d blindsided him and angrily stormed out of the restaurant where we were eating.

It soon became clear we would never be friends again.

Our mutual friends all took no side, except to say that I was an unforgiving sadist intent on bending others to my will and that therefore they could never forgive me. It was impossible, they said, with no consciousness of the incoherence of their righteous stand, to forgive someone who can’t forgive.

Among this crew of highly moral souls was my friend the brilliant rabbi/fundraiser. His Switzerland-like acceptance of this idiotic verdict was particularly grotesque to me. In a position to make peace between two hurt friends, and being admired and wise, able to influence others to be reasonable, he affected an impeccably neutral stance. It’s clear now he that he made a calculation, thinking only of what was worth the most to him and what was worth the least.

Our subsequent falling out was ugly enough, though friends noted that my final letter to him, though insulting, was somewhat restrained, not nearly as vicious as I am capable of making it.

The following Yom Kippur I wrote him a long, careful, peacemaking letter, many drafts of it. I was careful to set out all of the ugly things that had happened without blame, without making him feel defensive. I offered him the chance to speak like two mensches, at least one last time, a kind of do-over for the ugly ending to our long friendship a few months earlier. I persuaded him that we owed our long, affectionate friendship at least that.

He called and we were both calm, and engaging, and hoping for the best, I suppose. At one point I asked him, in his capacity as a rabbi, if he could think of a situation where it was proper for one Jew to tell another who comes to him to make amends before Yom Kippur to buzz off. “Who is allowed to act this way?,” I asked, almost rhetorically.

There was a long pause, and then my learned old friend said “Only HaShem”. Only God.

The People rest, and please be seated

Communication is needed to heal trauma

I’m listening to a fascinating audiobook, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump. One of the authors, talking about the collective trauma of people living under the control of a demanding bully, states an important precondition for recovering from trauma — communicating and being heard. There are few things more comforting, when you are in turmoil, than feeling truly heard.

A person forbidden to speak honestly, and blamed for having a problem, will never be able to free themselves from the pain of abuse. The truth of this statement becomes very obvious once you hear it, particularly if you’ve ever lived the need to explain your side of a story you are angrily not allowed to tell.

Trauma takes over your body after you are mistreated and hurt, and then, instead of being listened to with sympathy, are harshly blamed and censored. When your feelings are dismissed by the people you go to for support, the trap of trauma closes around you. It is this lack of empathy from those you trust that sears the traumatic event into a lifelong disability. Abandonment by others underscores the painful feeling of hopeless isolation that is one of the hallmarks of trauma.

I had a rabbi/fundraiser friend, an old, close friend of mine, tell me, after a year of my struggle to make peace with two mutual friends of five decades, adamant in their insistence that I am insanely unforgiving and unloving, that he had already made it clear that he’d never speak to me about them or to them about me. “If that’s not good enough for you, I don’t know what else to tell you,” he concluded.

Set and match, actually. No amount of talk or understanding, no honest peacemaking, can resolve this conflict, this close mutual friend of ours concluded. There is only eternal enmity for both of you and your permanent ostracism from the entire group of old friends who take no side, except that they can never forgive someone who can never forgive. If you have a problem with that, asshole, what do you want me to do? If you expect me to listen to “your side”, with any kind of sympathy, when you are so wrong, you’re truly nuts. If the suddenly severely limited friendship I offer is not good enough for you, I don’t know what else to say, except fuck off and die, my friend.

I’m thinking about this universally admired dickhead a lot in the days leading up to another Yom Kippur, high holy day of the righteous and unbearable hypocrite alike. He claimed, during our last calm chat (after I’d exerted myself to extend him the chance to talk like a mensch one last time), to have had unconditional love from his parents during his childhood. He had already demonstrated, in his wild attack while attempting to silence me the last time we spoke, that he was lying about unconditional love too, to himself and to me. Someone who was raised with unconditional love does not explode in rage when an old friend is in pain.

We live and learn in this world, or we remain perpetual two year-olds, ready to explode in rage any time we feel frustrated, instead of calmly listening to people who have always treated us with kindness when we needed it.