Category Archives: musing

Truth is not always obvious

It takes diligence, many times, to arrive at the truth about complicated things.  It is a process that sometimes involves pain and can result in punishment.   Many truths are hard to accept, so we retreat to endless nuance, interpretation, seeing it from another point of view.  Certain truths, if you don’t see them in time, will smash your face and leave you wondering how you wound up bloody and chained in a sadist’s basement.

Lies, on the other hand, can be constructed to fit your needs perfectly.  Feel threatened but can’t put your finger on what’s going on?  How about this: there is a vast conspiracy conducted by elites, who are beloved public figures, very influential, who, behind the scenes, meet to share child sexual slaves and drink their blood?   Doesn’t that explain why your spidy senses are tingling?   If you fear a certain type, the lie becomes much more potent by slugging those folks into the scenario.   It’s Puerto Rican pedophile cannibals, Jewish ones (of course), Muslims, Illegals, etc.

Obvious as it was once I heard Timothy Snyder say it out loud: the thousands of brazen lies we have been told by Trump and his spokes-sphincters over the last nine years have smudged the line between truth and lies.  Truth, what is that, really?   Aren’t alternative facts really just another spin on your so-called actual facts?  Different strokes for different folks.  Isn’t truth what you believe in your heart?  Doesn’t your heart know what is real, much better than an easily confused brain?

Once the line is sufficiently blurred it is time for the Big Lie.  This is a lie so audacious that people simply can’t believe it’s a lie — it’s unthinkable that a Hitlerian scale lie could be told over and over by everyone in a political party.  If 25% of  Americans actually believed the endless ads Trump ran that his 2020 election victory had been stolen from him, as Ted Cruz insisted on January 5th, 2021, isn’t that a reason to call time-out until the other 75% could be convinced of the same thing? 

Here is five minutes of Snyder’s brilliant discussion of this hideous, all too popular, dynamic.  Truth can be elusive and involves pain sometimes, lies are direct and easy to swallow, designed to make you feel just and righteous. Which one is your favorite?

The whole short talk is here

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.

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.

Help Bandy Lee’s message go viral!

Bandy Lee is a forensic psychiatrist who has great, and highly relevant, expertise from years working with violent psychopaths. Feeling that she had a professional duty to warn, based on her observations of newly elected President trump, she convened a 2017 conference on the Dangerous Case of Donald Trump. Lee and twenty-six highly respected colleagues, including Robert J. Lifton (author of, among other works, “The Nazi Doctors”) published The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, NY Times best-seller and invaluable primer on malignant narcissism. I recommend that book to everyone.

Trump’s allies were able to marginalize the indispensable guide to Trump’s pathology and largely remove it from public discussion. The conservative American Psychiatric Association, ably aided by the powerful NY Times, attacked and vilified the book as a clear violation of the APA’s Goldwater Rule.

That rule (binding only on members of the APA, but treated as an inviolable federal law) states that, no matter what public evidence exists, psychiatrists are forbidden from offering their informed opinions about any public person they have not personally interviewed — and may publicly draw psychiatric conclusions only if the person in question authorizes it.

In other words, the Goldwater Rule states that, if an angry psychopath in a position of public power is cool with public discussion of their rage and unslakable thirst for revenge, after personally consulting with a shrink, only then may the psychiatrist publicly speak about it.

Bandy Lee is brilliant, courageous, articulate and she has a CRUCIAL message that would wake up millions of undecided voters, if they were exposed to it. She has assembled great experts, and recently held a second conference on trump’s dangerous unfitness at the National Press Club [1]. What she has not been able to do is disseminate her message widely, in a way succinct enough for the average distracted, traumatized, non-intellectual American voter to digest, or even encounter.

Bandy Lee’s website is http://www.bandylee.com. Her Substack newsletter is at https://bandyxlee.substack.com/. You can read her detailed assessments and hear long form interviews at those sites, along with a video of the full recent conference. Sadly, you will never encounter her CRUCIAL information in a short, shareable form that could (and should, and MUST) go viral.

I URGE ANYONE READING THIS to put on your thinking cap and find a way to recruit a Ryan Reynolds, or some other genius of social media manipulation, for help getting Bandy Lee’s crucial message out to millions, particularly as it could well be the deciding factor for the “undecided” voters out there.

As I wrote to her on Substack:

Corporations (including a democratic forum like Substack) control most communication in the US, one way or the other.  There are only two ways to influence mass public opinion, both engines for disseminating persuasive information/content, true or false, are problematic.  

The corporate mass media news and editorial narrative leaves out context, engages in false equivalencies, allows lies to air unchecked, consents in the destruction of norms, normalizes pathology, etc.  Profit-driven mass media, whose only motive is financial gain, exerts tremendous influence on most Americans, particularly older voters.

“Social Media”, odious and divisive as it also is, is a powerful driver of public opinion, for better and for worse.  A meme is born when it hits quick, memorably makes a good point, and makes people want to share it.  Billions of shares of a video featuring a memorable dance to a song called Gangnam Style.

I don’t know how to use social media myself, as I’ve learned again recently trying to get answers for why trump appointees Louis DeJoy (slow the mail, cut costs) and Joseph Caffari (Homeland Security IG who, uh, accidentally let all January 6 secret service evidence be irretrievably destroyed) are still in positions of power, but there are geniuses in the field of internet marketing with expertise in how to create viral short videos.  Talk to the folks at Meidas Touch about how to make important, individual points in shareable 30 second bytes.   

Your expert insights need to be set out in short, shareable videos.  If undecided voters are exposed to your message, it’s hard to believe many would vote for trump.   You should be in touch with the Lincoln Project, for example, their take on your main points about Trump’s dangerousness, coming from experts in violent pathology assisted by experts in propaganda, would get wider exposure.  Talk to Anthony Davis about creating some shorts from your interviews with him, I have seen many 30-60 second sections of those talks that would make great shareable shorts.   We need 30 second clips of some of your best points, points that can instantly be shared. Millions of people need to hear them!

Your best-selling book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump is an indispensable primer for understanding the personality type capable of pathological violence.  That we have a presidential candidate for a major political party possessing all the clear warning signs of destructive rage, on steroids, is CRUCIAL for undecided voters to know.  

Trump’s brand is violence, fighting, oppositionality, never admitting fault or defeat.  A classic psychopath.   He’s already fomented criminal violence in his name that he’s promised pardons for, as well as constant threats of, and pardons for, future violence.   His handpicked (by his handlers) Supreme Court majority recently ruled that his pardons may not be questioned or appealed, even if they are offered for sale.

Blah, blah, blah. . . Dr. Lee is busy and I haven’t heard back from her.

On the well-funded extremist right, they always march in lockstep, speaking in one voice, defiantly repeating the same disproven lies over and over until they wear people out. On the non-fascistic side of the spectrum there are a million voices, ten million shades of nuance, and those diverse and personal messages have neither the persistence nor the compelling public force of a unified, infuriating talking point grunted over and over and over and endlessly amplified by mass media.

Bandy Lee correctly diagnoses the danger we face right now — Trumpism is a public health emergency, like the recent pandemic. Trump contagion (which, to be fair, emanates as much from Charles Koch, Leonard Leo, John Roberts and their filthy ilk as from their current performative avatar, the Orange Polyp, himself) has made millions admire and imitate his lowest impulses, impulses he cannot control. This way lies rage, more and more violence and eventually mass murder, guaranteed.

Want a nice factoid? In 2014 there were 912 antisemitic incidents in the United States, a number that has gone up every year since Trump’s (oops, trump’s) 2016 election — last year there were 8,873 reported antisemitic incidents [2]. I would assume all hate crimes in the US have increased in similar numbers, remember the violent aftermath of trump’s witty, peaceful Kung Flu call to violence?

You want to argue about whether Trump is dangerously, violently insane, an American Hitler or not? Put him in back power, surrounded by loyal MAGA appointees, wait a couple of years and — guaranteed, I’ll meet you in a death camp somewhere (if we’re lucky, that is). It took the actual Hitler twenty full years, from his violent attempted coup, to the opening of the first true Nazi death camps. All these creatures need is time.

[1] Bandy Lee, earlier today:

The theme of our conference was that fitness is not a subjective, partisan, or even political “opinion” but a scientific finding based on extensive research, clinical experience, and uniform application of medical standards to military officers, officers handling nuclear weapons, surgeons, and executive officials.  The consensus at the conference was that mental fitness is critically important for the U.S. presidency and that Donald Trump is decisively unfit.  It should become widely known that Trump’s mental unfitness has now been objectively measured in multiple ways; that mental health expertise is critical to explaining what he is and is not capable of doing; how dangerous it is to have a mentally unfit person in a position of power; and how his psychological dangers can quickly spread into social, cultural, and geopolitical dangers, by rendering domestic legal and political institutions, and global balances and alliances ineffectual.

source

[2] Reporter Bob Garfield, in a particularly brilliant post, includes this:

The preemptive blame, of course, is meant to both intimidate Jewish voters and rally the violent among MAGA faithful, such as the ones who attacked the Capitol over his 2020 “stolen election” lies, such as the “very fine” neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us,” such as the mass murderers who shot six Jews to death at a deli in Jersey City, NJ, such as Robert Bowers, guilty of gunning down worshipers in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, such as the perpetrators of 8873 antisemitic incidents in the United States last year alone (in 2014, the year before Trump’s first presidential campaign, there were 912, and the number has risen every year since), such as the Proud Boys, Goyim Defense League, Blood Tribe, Ku Klux Klan, QAnon, Black Hebrew Israelites, Atomwaffen Division and other hate groups.

source

A few thoughts for 5785

This is from a happy new year email to my cousin who lives on a moshav in Israel, not far from Jerusalem.

Your assessment of Jewish values and the reality of living in an antisemitic world was very good.  If only the values you rightly attribute to us were practiced by all Jews.   It is a trap, like antisemitism, to believe that just because someone is in your tribe they are motivated by only the best of the tribe’s moral code.  The bulk of humans are somewhere in the middle, with the best and worst being small minorities of any group (although the worst have the biggest influence, it often seems). 

I have experienced a Jewish lynch mob, composed of my dearest old friends, all good people and fine Jews, all of whom now consider me dead and have cut off their adult children from me as well, and I have to say, there is nothing more horrific.  To have a rabbi friend (who merely held a torch and remained tactfully silent during the lynching) tell me, when I asked him under what circumstances is it permissible for one Jew to angrily tell another who comes to make amends during the ten days of repentance to buzz off (as my closest friend had), that only HaShem [God] is allowed to do that — the idiotic, blasphemous icing on a disgusting cake.

The mark of a good person is treating other people fairly. No group has any monopoly on this excellent trait.

I just wrote a chapter about the difficulty of learning lessons you don’t want to learn, such as that your closest friends will abandon you en masse when a charismatic member of the group spreads a vicious lie about you (in my case that I am a sadistic, unrepentant torturer who tries to bend others to my will and is totally incapable of love or forgiveness). I certainly didn’t want to learn what I learned about my only sister, about most of my closest friends.  I resisted learning it for decades, believing in the undefeatable power of goodwill, humor, kindness, patience, extending the benefit of the doubt, until the power of those things was eventually defeated by a determined will never to be wrong, at any cost.

I’ve been forced to learn (much against my will) that there is a personality type who can never be wrong, no matter what, who will fight to the death if made to feel insecure, and if they are able to, will always exact fatal revenge for defiance of their will (this can be almost anything, this type is very thin-skinned).  Trump is an example that comes readily to mind.  

I had to finally understand that this also, tragically, defines my sister’s worldview.   My sins against her can apparently never be tallied and so she’s been required to lie to her children a few times to protect herself from the existential threat I pose to her and to them.  It’s awful, it’s terrible, it’s like antisemitism — reason, fact, cause and effect, love, kindness, patience, giving the benefit of the doubt, appeals for empathy — poof!  A desperately held belief may never be changed in this personality type (and others loyal to this type) it seems.