Category Archives: writing

The definition of insanity, redux

The meme definition of insanity, often attributed to Albert Einstein, is doing the same thing over and over expecting a different outcome. I offer a full-color real-life illustration of that principle in action. I am only slightly less insane, for most of this anecdote, than the madman I am describing.

An old friend was going through a difficult divorce (I know of few easy ones) from a wife whose impressive anger he was physically afraid of. He had reason to be afraid, she looked like she could kick the shit out of him if it came to it. They fought constantly, though he never crossed the line to find out if his wife would actually beat him to a pulp, maim or murder him.

That’s where I, his closest friend ever, as he often told me, came in. He could take out some of this anger in the safety of our friendship, through passive aggressive attacks. Physical aggression was never his style, nor mine, but if it came to it, he was taking no chances with me. So he’d provoke me, usually by playing a merciless devil’s advocate in any situation where I expressed indignation, hurt or confusion.

As I’d start getting pissed off and testily tell him to pump the brakes, he’d announce, each time, that I had a problem with my temper. That raises a separate question, most people will eventually lose their composure if provoked relentlessly enough by someone close to them.

Of course, he could never admit to provoking me, since he is a high minded man of peace who simply wants everyone to get along.  How would admitting he purposely makes his closest friend angry every time they got together make him look?  So we had a long stalemate that lasted several years.  We had more than one sit down to talk things out, things that I hadn’t yet realized were in the nature of the irrational beast that was our childhood friendship.  

During this time I exercised a patience that sometimes felt superhuman to me.  I almost slugged him on a couple of occasions, but our middle class upbringings got the better of that impulse.  I came to regard him as something close to a friend, but stopped trusting  him with vulnerabilities he could exploit.  This compromise made our friendship a seriously limited partnership.  If you can’t trust a friend with your feelings, there’s not much left.

In the end, after speaking to him many times about this constant provocation, and his reflexive denial that he’d ever provoked me, or anyone else, I concluded the friendship was not viable. This was some years before I learned the terrible law of some friendships — whatever you once tolerated from a friend is the baseline for what you will get in the future, if things start going south. There is no saving certain relationships. When you see contempt and the constant dismissal of your right to your actual feelings, a friendship can’t be saved.

Toward the end of his hellish thirty year marriage, and the official end of our friendship, I called to see how he was holding up. He texted back that we couldn’t talk on the phone, that any talk would need to be in person. He texted back that he needed to see me as soon as possible. A few days later he showed up in my neighborhood, texted when he arrived and we chose a corner to meet on. I stood on that corner and waved to him, as he pulled up. He looked around frantically, made a right turn and drove up Broadway. When I caught up to him at a red light and got in, I saw how stressed he was by the way one of his eyes was twitching.

He smiled and made small talk until I asked him what the urgency to meet in person was. Then he came to the point.

“I don’t know if our friendship can be saved,” he said, “too much damage may have already been done by what you did, and I don’t know if it’s forgivable.”

I think he understood from my expression that I had no idea what he was talking about, but, taking no chances, I said “you’ll have to help me out here, I truly have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Then it came out in a cascade. I had, either deliberately, or with a recklessness no friend is ever allowed to show to someone he cares about, tried to destroy his marriage.

You could have knocked me over with yer proverbial feather. I asked him to elaborate. It turns out that at a marriage counseling session his wife had quoted me, with massive distortion and out of context, to crippling effect. She was then able to say “I’m not the only one who knows you’re a compulsive liar. Your best friend from childhood says you’re a fucking liar!” citing what I’d supposedly said about two versions of the same story I’d heard from each of them.

His story of a recent conflict between an insane and destructive friend of his and his wife, an anecdote I had no interest in hearing, lasted less than a minute. He stopped, telling me he regretted that he’d started to tell it to me. I asked no questions and we went on to other subjects. His wife, who I always liked, called a few days later and told me the complete story. When she was done I said “well, that makes a lot more sense than what Moishe told me.”

“Oh, what did that fucking liar tell you?” she asked, gearing up for the next round with her provocative sparring partner husband.

I told her he’d started to tell me the story, I had no interest in hearing it, he thought better of telling it, stopped, I’d asked him no follow up questions. I told her I didn’t care to hear about it, and his partial version, which lasted about a minute, hadn’t made much sense, but that her long version totally explained what had actually happened.

From here it was a straight line to the marriage counselor agreeing with his angry wife that if he didn’t have the courage to confront a friend who called him a liar behind his back, a destructive person and false friend deliberately or recklessly trying to destroy his marriage, then neither his wife, nor the marriage counselor, could ever have any respect for him. Thus manipulated he rushed off, eye atwitch, to do battle and prove his courage under fire, to save his doomed marriage.

My reaction doesn’t matter for purposes of this story. I sat with him for a few hours, talking everything through, giving him context, making my best suggestions. I told him to go back and tell the marriage counselor what had actually happened, give her all the context.

I was still too innocent, somehow, to realize that talk, no matter how rational or persuasive, can never make a dent in craziness like this. I also didn’t yet grasp the right thing to do when confronted that way, particularly by someone who fears you. Taking the high road, I could have just left the car and walked away. Alternatively, I could have grabbed him by the front of his shirt and menaced him before walking away. I could have also offered him one hard, open handed slap in the face, to be done with the brittle veneer of our friendship forever. Talking reasonably wasn’t going to help anyone at that point, though, by reflex and long habit, I did this for literally a few hours. He even thanked me at the end.

Now we fast forward a decade or so, a period of non-friendship. He has become, in some ways, an observant Jew. He goes to the Chabad House in his town, puts on t’fillin (ancient prayer accoutrements bound to the head and arm) every morning to pray and studies the teachings of the Jewish religion with a rabbi.

The most important teaching of our religion is our duty to our fellow humans on the holiest day of the year, Yom Kippur. On that day, according to tradition, God judges each of us, according to our deeds. We are required, before nightfall on Yom Kippur, to seek forgiveness from those we’ve hurt the previous year, forgive those who seek our forgiveness and make amends whenever we can.

In this guy’s personal vision of Judaism, apparently, expressing sympathy for another person’s health problems is the highest moral act a person can perform. He calls periodically to express sympathy for my medical challenges, and ask endless questions about my several major health aggravations. I speak to him calmly, tell him about life lessons I’ve learned since we last spoke. He never has any new lessons to report. He calls a few months later, and after expressing shock that we haven’t talked for so long, asks the same detailed questions about the same aggravating health headaches.

In his mind, it would seem, if enough time passes after even the worst interpersonal ugliness, everything mystically heals. Time itself, through the operation of the Divine, perhaps, eliminates the need to do any more than show sympathy for physical troubles in order to make friendship magically bloom again, no matter what has occurred in the past. You can call this idea crazy, I certainly do. And yet, until now, I have picked up the phone when he calls. It is a weird thing on my part, I have to confess.

I recognize that he is, arguably, the most neurotic person I’ve ever met. It’s easy to see he lacks even the most primitive ability to be self-critical, though he is visibly self-loathing enough for a whole family of self-haters. Why do I pick up the phone when I see his name on the screen? I’m certainly far beyond expecting a different outcome.

I guess there’s a side of me that wants to see how far he will keep pushing this crazy envelope. There is a strange fascination for me, not untinged with horror, every time he reaches out as though we are still the best of friends. So far I haven’t had the heart to ask him this heartbreakingly simple, deal breaking question:

If you accuse somebody of maliciously trying to hurt you, and it turns out they were not trying to hurt you, that, acting on false intel, you acted unfairly, unwisely, hurtfully, in a way that would have badly hurt you, had someone done it to you, are you right to pray every day, and study the words of the sages, righteously hoping for a better life, without ever offering an apology to the person you hurt?

I could add, why don’t you ask your rabbi what the thing God wants you to do is? But that would be overkill, no? Like sending him a link to this piece.

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

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.

Feeling of dread

Some days I wake up with a feeling of dread that can be hard to shake.  Last night I slept eight hours but woke up feeling like I’d hardly slept.  There was a feeling in an unfamiliar part of my stomach, at the base of my bladder, other places where I’d been recently poked, probed and prodded — the reminder of bad medical news and an unscheduled operation I need to set up and have soon.  My eyes took a long moment to focus, the cataracts, after years of slowly making themselves known, appear to be spoiling for a fight with an eye surgeon.  The feeling of dread became more and more palpable.  It persists as I tap these keys.  I switch from first to second person in order to pry a little emotional distance from this persistent unease in the proverbial pit of my stomach.

That feeling in the pit of your stomach is telling you the truth. Dread needs to be dealt with. In the case of medical worries, those must be put on the calendar and treated, no matter how badly many of your recent medical experiences may have gone. In the case of making a difficult case, when you have right 100% on your side, which alone gains you nothing, you must calm yourself again and address what remains to be done in the short time left before the short SOL (statute of limitations) leaves you SOL (shit out of luck).

It is not hard to recognize that having detailed concerns about mistreatment by a professional dismissed in three curt sentences by the board that oversees professional discipline, without a hearing, without access to the evidence used to dismiss the complaint, without the right to appeal, would awaken a strong feeling of injustice instilled during a traumatic upbringing.  You will not be heard,  all concerns dismissed, if you write them down your arguments will be deemed unpersuasive, there is no appeal, asshole.   Why would fighting this familiar, mind-fucking battle, in court this time, feel any different as the clock winds down and your right to contest an arbitrary and capricious summary dismissal is about to disappear forever?

Why would an office of professional discipline not take five or six unethical acts complained of into consideration before dismissing a complaint without a hearing and with no right to appeal? You tell me, judge.

Why would a parent, hours before death, tell an adult child that the abuse they subjected them to was, in a real sense, never personal?  “I’d have acted the same brutal way toward you no matter what you did, no matter who you were” said my father, in that dying man’s voice he had at the end.  The only way you get to hear something like that from an abusive parent is by remaining supremely mild and calm in the face of strong emotion.  There is rarely anything to be gained by pointing out the monstrousness of a monster.  The dread might remain, but you obtain a certain advantage over it by remaining as calm and deliberate as possible facing its cause.

Damaged souls replicate themselves!

My father, I learned late in his life (and not from him) was the victim, from infancy, of his mother’s uncontrollable, violent temper. His mother’s lifelong brutality left him unable to trust anyone, including his own children. He fought us every night at the dinner table, cursed, insulted and undermined us. It was all he could do when he felt under attack. He was always on guard against threats to his fragile sense of wellbeing.

My sister and I suffered greatly under his childishness. He had the emotional resilience of a two-year old and the agile intellect of a skilled prosecutor, a daunting combination. His genius was his ability to calmly and persuasively reassure those he abused that he was motivated only by love and that any misunderstanding, while understandable, was not his fault in any way. In the end, he convinced my sister, who had dubbed him the Dreaded Unit (DU), of his sincere and unalterable love, in spite of his frequent angry overreactions.

My sister told me, not long after her son was born, that she was the DU. “I’m the DU,” she said nonchalantly at the Dunkin’ Donuts where we were having coffee. I reacted with alarm, telling her that as the mother of two young children she needed to fix that, get help to make necessary changes for the better.

“Being the DU means you can’t change,” she said.

Her answer, it took me decades to understand, was completely true. If you have experienced trauma and humiliation and adjusted to this by becoming a strong person who can never be wrong, never be questioned, that’s all she wrote as far as positive change in your future.

These monsters, these dreaded units, replicate themselves before they die. They leave behind the same exact monstrosity that harmed and haunted them for their entire life. They recreate themselves in their children, and then they die. Talk about a hellish vision of hopelessness.

Impossible irony

For a period of time I persisted in writing impossible letters, longshot attempts to persuade people I cared about to communicate with me, even as I knew they were now well beyond reasonable discussion. These letters attempted to do something no letter can do, silently get through to someone on the other side of a locked, fortified door and change their heart. I have a number of them here on this blahg. That I kept writing these letters is proof that I had not yet grasped an essential feature of human life — there are deeply rooted emotional positions that can never be changed.

I wrote these letters to try to repair painful estrangements. Only one, a letter to an old friend, a rabbi, ever achieved its short-term goal of reestablishing dialogue. That letter was perfected over the course of weeks, calmly making every painful point I needed to make while removing anything that could make the rabbi, who had behaved with surprising hostility toward me, feel defensive. It appealed irresistibly to his desire to be a mensch, to be admired, forgiven, to have his vanity stroked. We had a single warm but pointless talk as a result of that excellent letter. I realize now that the most moving letter I can write will change nothing.

At one point, after much agonizing, I wrote one of these letters to my niece and nephew, after years of estrangement. My sister is humiliated about certain true things that I witnessed in her family. She lives in terror of my big fucking mouth. If her children had relationships with me, the odds, she fears are overwhelming that eventually I would impart some of these humiliating true things to her children and she would never be able to reclaim their admiration and love.

A smart young man, around my niece’s age, offered to read the drafts of the letter and give me his feedback. He soon found himself at a loss. I mentioned to his father what a hard job his son had signed on to, and that I felt a little bad to have put that weight on him. The father volunteered to read the letter-in-progress as well. In the end, father and son both told me that my final draft of the letter was warm, loving and an excellent attempt at reaching out. I sent it.

I never heard back from my niece or my nephew. I have not heard from my sister since the letter to her children arrived. That was around three years ago. Now for a bit of impossible irony.

My old friends’ son, who had read the letter, visited us in a rented vacation house. He was unusually hopped up. His father had shared my pain about the silence from my niece and nephew. There was inexplicable, rising tension in that house that eventually became unbearable. Within a year the son would move back in with his parents and, two days later, be locked in a mental ward. His father and mother, after months of silence punctuated by anger, would be spreading the dubious, but apparently emotionally convincing, claim that I am the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. I am dead to all of them. At least I’ve finally grasped the ridiculousness of writing impossible letters.

We live and learn, those of us capable of profiting from our most painful mistakes. Many have learned everything essential that they will ever learn by the time they are two years old, clenching their fists and vowing never to be hurt again, no matter what kind of person they are obliged to become. Writing a letter hoping to successfully question this kind of rigid, brittle self-confidence is pointless. Success is impossible, and the mission is futile, if also a supreme artistic challenge. I have finally learned that it is hubris to expect to succeed in that particular challenge.