“The story of a brutalized life can’t be grasped unless you understand the lifelong damage trauma produces.  They refer to this trauma-induced damage now as PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, you can find it in the DSM that every shrink has on his desk, it’s now a well-known syndrome.  The trauma will trigger echoes throughout your life, put you right back into it, where you will have to fight for your life,” said the skeleton of my father.

“That’s one reason I had such undying hatred for pedophiles, the lifelong damage certain adults do by putting their own need for domination and pleasure above the life and well-being of a child.  Child molesters perform the archetypal atrocity — never aware of anything beyond their own raging desire, devoid of  empathy. 

“From the point of view of the survivor of an atrocity–  imagine living through the trench warfare of World War One, somehow surviving that sickening, senseless slaughter.  At the end you and the other survivors leave the battlefield crusted in filth, stinking, sticky with the blood of your friends who were slaughtered.  They have to cut the uniform and boots off you.  They give you a shower and a new uniform, a haircut and a shave, pat you on the back and send you home.  They have a parade for you when you arrive back home in your French village, or in London, or Berlin, or Fort Lee, New Jersey.  The stench never leaves your nostrils, and at night when you wake up from a nightmare, you will not be reassured to find yourself in your own bed,” said the skeleton.  “It’s like one of God’s curses from Levitcus 26, for the lucky ones.  ‘As for those of you who are left…’

“Eddie got back from Vietnam where he saw a lot of combat, he became a cop.  You remember Eddie, a handsome, dashing guy, a man’s man, charming, great sense of humor.  He used to say he had no patience for the whining vets who wanted to blame the government for their problems, that they should just man up and suck it up and stop blaming other people because they were fucked up and so on.  Then he marries the beautiful, smart, lovely and accomplished Christine, you remember, at their wedding you pinned me to the spot, made me admit I’d abused you and your sister, which I did… but anyway, do you remember how things ended with them?  

“With the most normal and lovable All-American hero and the love of his life, that super-couple everyone wanted to be around?  Things ended badly for them.  He was fucking everything that moved, I understand, with a wife like that.  He even tried to put the moves on one of her daughters.  She wasn’t a little girl, you know, she was in college, but… what the fuck was he thinking?

“It reminds me of what Lance Rentzel said when they asked him about reports he was cheating on Joey Heatherton: ‘why would I go out for a hamburger when I got steak at home?’  I know the quote’s attributed to Paul Newman, but I always imagine it was Rentzel.  Which would have meant Lance would have had to have said it prior to exposing himself to that ten year-old girl, whose family wouldn’t settle, and he not only fell from grace, his filet minon divorced him.  

“Anyway, you know, you always paint our family dinner table as a scene from the First World War.  You have biplanes strafing, barbed wire, coils of chlorine gas rolling in, the enormous piles of human shit, washed with piss, one forgets that thousands of men in muddy trenches have to shit and piss every day, and deal with lice, and crotch rot, and stink foot, and gangrene and all that other crap, that’s before they are ordered to go over the top with bayonets fixed and charge into the machine guns.  

“You were being poetic, I suppose, describing our family dinner table like something out of Ypres in World War One, but you were not completely wrong about it.  It was like that, in some fundamental way, you captured its essence.  It was a war.  I always called it a war, each meal was another skirmish, another battle.  I don’t dismiss the trauma of trying to eat your dinner every night at a table where your father is snarling and assuring you that you will lose the fucking war, no matter how many battles you may win, I am saying this to make a larger point.  

“When you are the victim of systematic and inescapable brutality, generations of our ancestors used as punching bags, and worse, or those poor bastards who find themselves on actual battlefields, facing sudden death from any direction for reasons they can only think of in terms of bravery, honor and defense of their fellow soldiers …

“Look, Elie, I’m talking emotionally now, you will have to comb and iron this into something more presentable, the point is, those who have not experienced these traumatic things will have find it impossible to understand what you are even talking about.  It’s like the way I always mocked you, ‘boo hoo, my father is so mean.  Grow up, you little wimp….’.  You don’t say that to a seven year-old.  I mean, you only say it if you are twisted that way.  The only thing that will twist you that way is having been brutalized.”

I understand the workings of this infernal machine very well, dad.  Now I do.  I understand it clearly now, though it was a little out of focus for me for the first few decades.  

“Well, you will be doing a great service if you can lay this out clearly for others to see,” said the skeleton, giving me my next assignment in this long voyage to tell his story.  “You have to make sure they can actually feel that moment, when you snap awake, in the middle of the original trauma that turned you into a monster, choking on all those feelings, with only a terror to survive.”  

And that moment of clarity and moral resolve when you choose not to be a monster.

 “Yes, do not neglect to describe that moment,” said the skeleton, urging me to go to sleep now myself.

“Look, you’ve come to the hard part,” said the skeleton, yawning.  “Remembering everything you could about my life and writing it down, day by day, as it came to you– what your professional writer friend called ‘the memory dump’ phase– well, that was the easy part.  Now that you’ve got 180,000 words worth of memories dumped… heh.  Good luck putting it into a nice salable narrative now.”

Indeed.   

“Now, like everything else in life– if you want to sell it, there has to be an immediate dramatic focus that gets a reader’s attention, makes people line up to buy it.  No publisher is going to pay you without the marketing department’s promise that they will get paid way more.  No profit in selling something for no profit, you dig.

“It’s got to be sexy, even a story about celibacy has to be sexy.   You want to read about some priest who tortures himself because he finally jerked off?  Nah.  You want to read about the explicit torments that finally broke this charismatic monk (even if he was, or especially if he was, a real-life troll) and made him vividly spank the puppy.  I can’t tell you how to frame this story, but ingeniously frame it you must.  You haven’t told my story until it’s a tale people need to hear the end of.  A story with a pay-off they’ll pay for.

“It’s not like I killed ten people from a tower, or physically beat the shit out of you and your sister, or was a famously violent racist demagogue, or a beautiful and shameless young female celebrity, or even was assaulted by cops and the recipient of a huge cash settlement from the city.  I wasn’t fabulously rich, I wasn’t particularly talented.   I didn’t do anything to make me famous or newsworthy.   Was I even remarkable in any way?  What is the real story here?”

Leaving aside the question of why I am wrestling with it here, on a ‘public’ website, I have an idea of the shape it needs to take.  It starts with a heated and relentless 45 year argument with seemingly no end.  The argument ends, the last night of the angry old man’s life, with too-late agreement, the deathbed gift of reconciliation for the man about to die, after he admits most of the blame was his for the long war.

The reader wakes up in a room where the war is raging, fire is belching out, there’s screaming, machine gun racket, the death-groans of mortally wounded animals.   There is no apparent cause for the war, as senseless and brutal as any, but a young child is being angrily blamed for starting it, continuing it.  Both adults are furiously wailing at the kid, trying to get him to admit he is a fucking war criminal.

We see the accused kid at the beginning, a baby in his crib, old enough to hold his head up and turn it to his father, but not old enough to do much more than that.

“You were certainly old enough to stare at me accusingly with those big, black eyes,” says the father, “you never took your goddamn eyes off me.  Every time I turned my head, there was you, with those two big, black eyes, boring into me, accusing me of God knows what.”  

Panning back the camera shows we are not in a random insane asylum.  This is an ordinary kitchen table in a suburban home, although the table is on fire, with the rat-tat-tat of strafing machine guns, the whiff of rolling chlorine gas, the pounding of the big guns.

“You’re so goddamn melodramatic,” the mother says to the boy, opera wailing in the background, her eyes burning with passion.

“Leave your mother out of this,” snarls the father, “you started it, you continue it, you fight us every step of the way and you may think you’re winning, you may even be winning this battle, but you’re going to lose the war.  I guarantee, you will lose this war, mark my words.”  

The camera once again pulls back to take in the wider scene, assure the reader again that we are not viewing a tight shot in a madhouse.

We are also, of course, viewing a tight shot in a madhouse.  There are thousands of these madhouses on every block in suburbia, on every floor in every city.  I always think it a kind of blessing that I grew up in a house where the war was at least out in the open.  

That could be the PTSD talking, trying to put a positive spin on the terror of it, I suppose.   Can it be that some things are just horrible with no redeeming features?   

“It can certainly be that some things are just horrible with no redeeming features.  You want one?  Poverty.  Big word for only three syllables.  You want another one?  Rage. One syllable, total motherfucker.   But most horrible things, it’s true, I’ll grant you, there is usually some kind of redeeming feature.  The scale that we weigh such things on is very tricky to operate,” the skeleton made a crazy balancing gesture on an invisible scale between his bony hands.

You got that right.  I’m taking objectively horrible senseless brutality, and weighing it against the many infinitely precious things that came with it.  But not without a phenomenal cost.

“Not without a phenomenal cost,” said the skeleton.

A friend, after his father’s death, found a small box containing his father’s most important documents, arranged in a neat pile.  The several most valued were banded together in a short stack, wrapped in paper.  Looking through this small collection of selected membership and identification cards, dated photos, important legal documents and concise, hand-written notes my friend was able to assemble a chronology of his father’s life, learn a few things he hadn’t known about his father.  

My uncle, a meticulous man with an impeccably organized file cabinet, left labeled folders containing his life’s work.  My cousin, who couldn’t stand his father, looked over these papers and tossed most of them.  

“He wrote two children’s books he never did anything with,” my cousin told me the other day about my father’s brother.  That his father had never pursued publication provided yet another reason for my cousin to be disgusted by his narcissistic father.  It surprised me that my uncle had written two children’s books.  I asked if they were any good.  

“No, they were both complete shit, corny Jewish-themed stories illustrated with kind of stick figure drawings, but, of course, he never did anything with them, made a feeble attempt to get them published and left them in his file cabinet for me, along with sheafs of plans and proposals for his National American Civil Servants’ Museum, which, mercifully, died with him, ” said my cousin.  

This is a perfect illustration of the hanging judge’s modus operandi, turning a reasonable conclusion– my book attempts were feeble so I won’t persist in trying to publish them — into an another proof of why the defendant deserves to fry.    

“We’re all prosecutors or defense attorneys, most of us constantly switching roles,” said the skeleton of my father, who left virtually no papers behind, but had been skillful and active for both the prosecution and defense his entire life.

After my father died I found a leather-bound volume with my father’s name embossed on the cover.  The leather was soft, thick, reddish tan, and there was no hard cover beneath it.  In the bound volume was my father’s Masters’ thesis, a few hundred typed pages on onion skin paper.  You could see the indentations the typed letters left in their carbon impression on the copy that was bound for my father.   The thesis was about the abortive attempt to form a third political party, the Union Party, to help unseat FDR, who would go on to win the 1936 election in a landslide.  

At the center of the story was the party’s founder, a firebrand Catholic priest called Father Coughlin, a man my father mentioned from time to time as an early example of a dangerous mass-media demagogue.  Coughlin broadcast his populist, increasingly antisemitic talks to an audience of millions coast to coast on the new medium of radio.  

In 1938 Charles Coughlin’s popular weekly magazine, Social Justice, would publish, in installments, the famous 1903 Czarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  The Protocols, still cited by anti-Semites as proof of their deepest suspicions,  sets out the imagined minutes of a sinister meeting in which leaders of the international Jewish conspiracy that controls the world set out their twisted beliefs.

My father’s thesis does not focus on this sordid, tasty part of the story, which in any case only emerged full-blown a couple of years later, when Coughlin began expressing admiration for Mr. Hitler and Mr. Mussolini.   This was after the assassination of the charismatic Huey Long, Coughlin’s intended presidential candidate, ended any real chance for the Union Party.  

My father’s thesis has little dramatic color, it is a workmanlike, academic description of the failed attempt by a group, with Father Coughlin its most important component, to oppose the popular president whose New Deal had begun to create the social safety net Americans are protected by to this day.

“Look, man, you never listened to me, that I can recall, but you might want to listen to this,” said the skeleton of my father. “You’re reminding me of your boy Woody Allen as the young Alvie Singer in Annie Hall, avoiding sex with his first wife, Alison Porchnick, by fretting over Lee Harvey Oswald’s marksmanship.  You remember him pacing the room, chin in hand, as Alison sighs on the bed, and he’s ruminating out loud about whether the fatal shots could have come from the angle of the book depository window, out of the barrel of that crude rifle?

“Father Coughlin, really, Elie, who gives a fuck about the Rush Limbaugh of the 1930s?  The hard work, taking what you’ve written and making a compelling pitch out of it– well, that’s a lot harder than daydreaming about moving the hearts of your readers with an endless series of arguably interesting asides.  You want to move the hearts of your readers?  You already know what to do, tell them a moving story.  There is one gigantic story here, staring you in the face.

“The story is about rage and the difficult project of seeking a healthy refuge from rage, and finding forgiveness.  Rage was in the hearts of the people who ripped through areas of Europe where terrified strangers, among them almost our entire family, waited to be murdered.  Rage was in the heart of my tiny mother, whipping me across the face.  My own rage, expressing itself through the bursting skin that could no longer contain it.  I’d be carted to the hospital, snarling, insisting that I was the most sane, balanced, reasonable man in the world.  Left you and your sister twitching, wondering for decades what the hell was wrong with you that you could drive your father to such anger. 

“How old were you before you realized how insane it was that your mother and I believed, until our deaths, that you were an irrationally enraged baby who accused, challenged and attacked us from the moment you were born? ”  

I was probably a young teenager, I would guess.  Though, outside of fighting it, I had little idea what to do about it until I was in my early thirties.

“How many decades passed before your sister realized she’d been blamed for things, tried and found eternally guilty, on the flimsiest of evidence,  tiny indiscretions that should probably not even have been made an issue of at all, let alone set out as the bedrock of her supposedly defective character?”  

Decades, she told me.  She was literally forty before she began to piece it together in any meaningful way.

“Right, so you blame yourself, that’s the only natural conclusion.  Believe that if somebody is beating the shit out of you it must have something to do with you.  Like the Jew who ran the little store in the muddy shit-hole in Belarus.  What did his actions have to do with the horde that stomped in, raped his family and cut his throat?  

“Wait, I retract that.  Nobody wants to read a long, musing account of anonymous slaughter.   It’s like my Masters’ thesis– it served the purpose it was intended for, fulfilling my academic requirement for the degree, but I’d never think of having something so dry published.  True, well-researched, arguably insightful it also may be, but dry.  Too dry for the mass audience any writer even minimally hip about marketing would even consider sending out.

“Look, here you are, once again betting the entire farm on this project, that you will succeed, against all odds, in writing such a nuanced and moving portrait of an alternately endearing and monstrous man that your audience will coo over your discussions with Terry Gross and Leonard Lopate.  You’re going for the fence on every swing.  You imagine that following this book, two or three others, then the elusive MacArthur grant that will enable you to fund your society-changing democratic problem-solving workshop for poor kids.

“In the end, it’s your papers, Elie.  Not a small, carefully selected, preserved batch that tells a concise, simply told tale, but a rambling, sprawling, meandering, tortuous, recursive attempt, a hundred thousand papers long, mostly on colorful,  incomprehensible scraps, to tell the simplest story ever told: I was alive.”

The skeleton seemed to sigh, no longer alive, the telling of his story left in someone else’s shaky hands. 

“Martin Luther King, Jr., sitting up in heaven, has got to be one of the most pissed off angels up there,” said the skeleton of my father, considering King’s famous remark that forgiveness is not an occasional act but a permanent attitude.  

“Forgive those who hate you, forgive those who humiliate you, forgive those who will never act humanly toward you, forgive those who will never admit they are shitting on you.   King has got to be the angriest man in heaven.  He did everything the way you would wish an oppressed person to petition for change.   See how much has changed as a result of his life and sacrifice?”

Well, less than half of black children in America are now born in poverty.  

“The percentage has actually gone up under our first black, our first mulatto, our first post-racial president,” said the skeleton.

That’s not fair, dad.  He’s going to make some serious Tubmans on the lecture circuit when he’s through being the president.  Plus, he’s surrounded by people who hate him, just because he’s a Muslim born in Kenya.

“Of course, you’re right,” said the skeleton.  

I am thinking about forgiveness.  Not as a permanent attitude but as a psychic necessity.  If we don’t forgive, we carry the hurt and anger of the original injury until the end.

“Well, you can always use denial.  That’s what most people do.  You keep it in a box with a tight lid.  The shit will come out once in a while, during a fight, or a bout of insomnia, but most of the time it can be kept quietly in an air-tight box.  That’s the way most people handle it,” said the skeleton. “You know, that’s probably a good part of what my psoriasis was about, holding the rage in until it split my skin open.” 

Did you ever forgive anyone?  

“No, not really.  But, look, I felt bad about that at the end, when I sought your forgiveness for having been such an implacably angry bastard,” said the skeleton.  

I was kind of amazed to hear my almost eighty-one year-old father apologize for the first time.  

“Well, that’s the way it is, most of the time.  We don’t do things until we have to,” said the skeleton.  “I know you and your sister speculated about whether, if I’d known I was dying months in advance, I would have had the kind of discussion you and I had the last night of my life weeks or months earlier.   You said I would have started making my peace in a more systematic way, your sister said I would have waited ’til the very end anyway.  Who knows?  

“Most of what you are assembling here is in the realm of speculation.  The muddy, doomed little hamlet of Truvovich?  Did it even exist in the first place?  I assume so, because that’s what I was told by my mother, my uncle.  Look on a map, even one made before the Nazis raked under hundreds of such ill-fated little shitholes.  No trace of the place.

“So you speculate, it was across the Pina River from Pinsk, a ferry ride, they said.  In the marshes, yes, that’s what’s across the river from Pinsk.  Marshes, mud, we’ve heard the place described as muddy.  You speculate.  Sometimes that’s all we have to go on, sometimes not even that.

“So now you find yourself floundering as you try to find the narrative whip to drive this herd of meandering dogies into a story.  Are you surprised?  There is a wealth of detail here in these five hundred plus pages, but not the thread of a story.  Have you made your reader vitally curious about this fascinating monster of a protagonist?  No?  Then, as Calvin Coolidge told the woman who bet her husband she could get the taciturn president to say more than two words:  you lose.”  The skeleton sniffed the hot, humid, mid-summer breeze.

I lose, sure, unless I can find my way.  

“Here’s hoping you find your way,” said the skeleton, looking out with sightless eyes, his jaw set in permanent wryness.

…there is no point to imagine anything better about ourselves.  We are born carved in stone, whatever our original features and limitations — so be it, our power to change any of it is virtually nil. It is folly, then, to imagine draft two, improving the flow of thought and feeling, rendering it in more moving language.  

“Well, that’s reductio ad absurdum, you know that,” said the skeleton of my father, much wiser now eleven years after his death.  “An exaggerated straw man jackass position to try to make the adversary’s view look ridiculous.”  

Well, in the case of this argument, my position is aided greatly by the exaggerated straw-man jackass absurdity of my adversary’s.

“Well, the proof of your position will be if you succeed, after a life of avoiding all contests.  The proof will be if we read about this book, well-received in the New York Times.  The proof will be a decent pay day, or not.  I’m not the one to judge whether you are deluding yourself about there being a story here worth telling, Elie,” said the skeleton.  “I’m also not the judge of whether you are the man to draw the story out of the stone I was carved in.”  

It’s me or nobody, old man.  

“‘Old man’ is for people who are alive.  I am old, I am five, I am every age I ever was during my life.  Who is the man, after his life is over?” the skeleton of my father paused meaningfully, expression mysterious as a Sphinx.  

“My life is now a book, every week a paragraph, every few years a chapter, if you can make it so.  Go ahead, if you can, see what you can make out of it.  I wish you the best, I’d like to be remembered as more than a modest, sagacious man, to those who can read the Hebrew words carved into my headstone, should they happen on my grave in an obscure corner of Westchester.”

That is the plan, really my only plan at the moment.  Why the hell not?  There are virtually no other stories about anyone else in our brutally pruned little family, no more than a shard left of any of them.  The wind whispering past your grave knows more about all this than anyone alive.  

“Besides you, presumably,” said the skeleton, eyes on nothing.  

Besides me, here for another few winks of an eye.

My father and I had a lifelong argument over whether or not a person can change their outlook and feelings in any meaningful way.   This is a pretty fundamental question, it seems to me, and how you feel about the possibility of change, and your willingness to work toward it, is the difference between hope and resignation.

The argument apparently started when I was less than ten weeks old, which really freaked my father out and started us off on the wrong foot.   It was a big mistake, I realize now, to challenge my father at such an early age, and if I had it to do over again, I probably would have tried to have been more conciliatory.  

At ten weeks, it seems, I’d reached my limit and went into a prolonged temper tantrum.  While this immature show of red-faced, fist-clenched rage greatly frightened my parents, it also pissed both of them off.  The pediatrician laughed it off, but my parents could not.

It didn’t help things when, a few months later, my first precocious words were “go fuck yourself.”  I admit that didn’t help a bit, as it only confirmed what they were already pretty sure of.  

“Well, you’re trying to be funny about it, but some babies just are born fucking pricks; it’s medical fact,” said the skeleton of my father from his hilltop grave in Cortlandt, New York, annoyed to have to state the obvious so soon in this account.  “You were born with a fucking hard-on against the world.”

Now the only question was ‘can a person change their nature?’  I approached the subject with a certain optimism.   My father’s position was an emphatic ‘no’.  

“You can change only the most superficial things about yourself, the deeper feelings, the impulses, those things remain hard-wired,” my father always insisted.

But you yourself are living proof that people can change, dad, I told him, toward the end of our last argument.  

After I told you I would no longer tolerate abuse disguised as fatherly advice, after I told you I wouldn’t stick around to be mistreated, you changed your behavior.  Things have been much better the last fifteen years or so.  How can you discount the salubrious effect your changed behavior has had on our relationship? 

My father was old at this time, almost eighty.  He had less than two years left, though, of course, neither of us knew it as we argued that day in his den in Coconut Creek, Florida.  He was probably already well into the undiagnosed liver cancer that he’d find out about six days before his death, shortly after the E.R. doctor gave my sister that instant, meaningful look.  My old man was tired, he was desperate.  Things had not worked out for him, he was choking on disappointment, frustration, unslakable anger.  His son, already in his late forties, was still trying to make his infernal point, still senselessly hammering away at his father’s shield.   My father smiled, but it was a horrible smile.

“Hah!” he said without mirth, with the opposite of mirth, really.  “I merely changed my superficial reactions.  My deeper feelings never changed at all, they cannot change or be changed, as much as you might try to convince yourself they can be.  I always felt the same way, my feelings never changed, I just honored your request not to speak of my true feelings about you.”   He saw that he had not yet said enough, I was still standing, not even sweating, really.  

“If I ever told you how I really felt about you, it would do such irreparable harm we could never have any kind of relationship at all.  I recommend we keep our conversation to sports, and politics, and books, the kind of civil pleasantries I exchange with Roy.”  

You want to keep our conversation to the kind of civil pleasantries you exchange with somebody you just told me again how much you despise?  

He nodded, unwilling to admit the grotesqueness of his desperation to somehow win this argument.  

I took a breath, shook my head.  

OK, I guess you win, dad.  People can’t change.  I go back to my original position then.  Why don’t you go fuck yourself?  

Two years later, in spite of the fact that we cannot change our essential natures, I stood mildly in my father’s hospital room the last night of his life.  I was there to listen, to help however I could in the difficult transition he had to make.  I was like an old family priest taking a very sophisticated white collar criminal’s final confession.  

“You know,” the dying man said in an incredibly strained voice he wouldn’t be using much longer, “I felt you reaching out many times over the years… I was just too fucked up to have the kind of relationship I should have had with you.  I was always afraid it was going to be a fight.  I think now how much richer my life would have been if I hadn’t seen everything as a zero-sum battle to the death.  That’s my fault, you’re supposed to have some fucking insight…”  

I nodded, what could I say?  

“I wish we could have had this kind of talk fifteen years ago,” he said, his voice weaker still.  

We both knew he’d be gone now in a very short time, he was like a candle burned down to the very end, his light becoming dim.  

Fifteen years? I remember thinking.  A senseless, brutal war for almost thirty-five years and fifteen years of peace at the end?  It didn’t seem like a very good proportion.

Some time after he died the next day I realized, shit, fifteen years would have been pretty good.   I’d take fifteen years.

“You’re an increasingly judgmental bastard,” observed the skeleton, as I cut and pasted some passages from Leviticus.  “I told you not to be like me.  You know that ‘my way or the highway’ shit is very bad and you recall how it tormented me on my deathbed to have lived my life in that blinded black and white mode.  And why this sudden intolerance for religion?  I mean, you have that damning portion of Leviticus all cued up, cut and ready to paste, and it certainly does not make God look like a very nice guy.  You know, especially that bit about making people literally eat their own sons and daughters.  Why this antipathy and why now?”  

I thought of the tiny, red-haired religious woman who whipped my infant father across the face with the cord from her steam iron while teaching him her strict version of Judaism.  I thought of the many religious people of every faith who are gentle, and kind, and generous– who are brought to their highest natures by religious feelings.  I thought of those true believers who, in the name of religion, put people to the sword, who put millions to every kind of sword.   Here is God Himself speaking in Leviticus 26.  

(I hadn’t realize how droll the Eternal Creator could be until I read 26:36, check out the comedic brilliance of that opening line.)

¹⁴ “‘But if you will not listen to me and carry out all these commands, ¹⁵ and if you reject my decrees and abhor my laws and fail to carry out all my commands and so violate my covenant, ¹⁶ then I will do this to you: I will bring on you sudden terror, wasting diseases and fever that will destroy your sight and sap your strength. You will plant seed in vain, because your enemies will eat it. ¹⁷ I will set my face against you so that you will be defeated by your enemies; those who hate you will rule over you, and you will flee even when no one is pursuing you.

¹⁸ “‘If after all this you will not listen to me, I will punish you for your sins seven times over. ¹⁹ I will break down your stubborn pride and make the sky above you like iron and the ground beneath you like bronze. ²⁰ Your strength will be spent in vain, because your soil will not yield its crops, nor will the trees of your land yield their fruit.

21 “‘If you remain hostile toward me and refuse to listen to me, I will multiply your afflictions seven times over, as your sins deserve. 22 I will send wild animals against you, and they will rob you of your children, destroy your cattle and make you so few in number that your roads will be deserted.

23 “‘If in spite of these things you do not accept my correction but continue to be hostile toward me, 24 I myself will be hostile toward you and will afflict you for your sins seven times over. 25 And I will bring the sword on you to avenge the breaking of the covenant. When you withdraw into your cities, I will send a plague among you, and you will be given into enemy hands. 26 When I cut off your supply of bread, ten women will be able to bake your bread in one oven, and they will dole out the bread by weight. You will eat, but you will not be satisfied.

27 “‘If in spite of this you still do not listen to me but continue to be hostile toward me, 28 then in my anger I will be hostile toward you, and I myself will punish you for your sins seven times over. 29 You will eat the flesh of your sons and the flesh of your daughters. 30 I will destroy your high places, cut down your incense altars and pile your dead bodies[b] on the lifeless forms of your idols, and I will abhor you. 31 I will turn your cities into ruins and lay waste your sanctuaries, and I will take no delight in the pleasing aroma of your offerings. 32 I myself will lay waste the land, so that your enemies who live there will be appalled. 33 I will scatter you among the nations and will draw out my sword and pursue you. Your land will be laid waste, and your cities will lie in ruins. 34 Then the land will enjoy its sabbath years all the time that it lies desolate and you are in the country of your enemies; then the land will rest and enjoy its sabbaths. 35 All the time that it lies desolate, the land will have the rest it did not have during the sabbaths you lived in it.

36 “‘As for those of you who are left, I will make their hearts so fearful in the lands of their enemies that the sound of a windblown leaf will put them to flight. They will run as though fleeing from the sword, and they will fall, even though no one is pursuing them. 37 They will stumble over one another as though fleeing from the sword, even though no one is pursuing them. So you will not be able to stand before your enemies. 38 You will perish among the nations; the land of your enemies will devour you. 39 Those of you who are left will waste away in the lands of their enemies because of their sins; also because of their ancestors’ sins they will waste away.

“Well, I’ll grant you, that does look bad out of context,” said the skeleton.  “Don’t you think it’s only fair to cut and paste the rewards for not being hostile to God?”  

Yes, I do think it’s only fair.  He makes a very generous offer.  We also have to acknowledge that His “As for those of you who are left…” at 36 is complete genius.

1 “‘Do not make idols or set up an image or a sacred stone for yourselves, and do not place a carved stone in your land to bow down before it. I am the Lord your God.

² “‘Observe my Sabbaths and have reverence for my sanctuary. I am the Lord.

³ “‘If you follow my decrees and are careful to obey my commands, ⁴ I will send you rain in its season, and the ground will yield its crops and the trees their fruit.⁵ Your threshing will continue until grape harvest and the grape harvest will continue until planting, and you will eat all the food you want and live in safety in your land.

⁶ “‘I will grant peace in the land, and you will lie down and no one will make you afraid. I will remove wild beasts from the land, and the sword will not pass through your country. ⁷ You will pursue your enemies, and they will fall by the sword before you. ⁸ Five of you will chase a hundred, and a hundred of you will chase ten thousand, and your enemies will fall by the sword before you.

⁹ “‘I will look on you with favor and make you fruitful and increase your numbers,and I will keep my covenant with you. ¹⁰ You will still be eating last year’s harvest when you will have to move it out to make room for the new. ¹¹ I will put my dwelling place^[a] among you, and I will not abhor you. ¹² I will walk among you and be your God, and you will be my people. ¹³ I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt so that you would no longer be slaves to the Egyptians; I broke the bars of your yoke and enabled you to walk with heads held high.

As promised, that great teaching, from the Sayings of the Fathers, on anger and forgiveness.  

One thing my father had great difficulty with was forgiving.  I can’t recall a single instance when he ever forgave anyone.  He never forgave himself, first and foremost, though he also defended himself relentlessly at all times.   A strange combination, but unfortunately not an uncommon one.  

Here is what Sayings of the Fathers’ has to say about anger and forgiveness, and the four kinds of dispositions.

Once you see it laid out this way, it’s very hard to see it much differently.  The type who is slow to anger, quick to forgive is also translated as “righteous” and “saintly”, the root of the word chasid being kind, benevolent, gracious.   The fourth type, quick to anger, slow to forgive, is our friend Rah-shah — the bad one.

It is clearly best to be slow to anger, for anger helps nobody solve anything, though it may get you momentarily out of the doldrums from time to time (but not as well as a good laugh, or emotions like hope and a desire to help), and one can argue that injustice should make you angry, and mobilize you to fight it. Anger at injustice certainly has its place.  Between people, however, it is best to be slow to anger.  If one is slow to anger but also slow to forgive: your gain is offset by your loss.

Of course, the alternative posed against anger in this translation is not forgiveness, but a willingness to be appeased.  לרצות  means appease, placate, to try to please.  In this scenario the person who has angered you has sought your forgiveness, tried to make amends.  

This is significant, since it is difficult for most people to forgive someone who accepts no part in having made you angry.  Someone who refuses to accept a sincere apology, a real attempt to make peace, is, indeed, as my grandmother Yetta used to say, not a bit nice.

This section of Pirkey Avot strikes me as a bit of real wisdom, hidden in the back of a prayer book that has always struck me as an exercise in blind faith and wishful thinking.  At that memorial service yesterday we read responsively, in words meant to console the mourners, that God always helps the helpless, that God is all-forgiving, that God is ever kind and merciful, that God will never abandon those in need, that God rewards the just, that God lifts up and embraces all who call to Him.

I whispered to a friend, like the Rah-shah, that I thought some of this sarcasm was a bit over the top.  She had the good sense not to snicker, snort or hiss, though I don’t think she necessarily disagreed with me.  I read this, which I loved and photographed:

This same, gracious, quick to forgive Eternal One who told his Chosen People that He was a vengeful and jealous God who would force parents who disobeyed Him to eat the flesh of their children, torture their descendants for generations, visiting the sins of the parents on their children’s children, yea, upon their children’s children’s great-grandchildren.  Of course, that was only God speaking in anger.

I thought about my father so deeply hurt he could not find a way to forgive a life that could brutalize him from the time he was a defenseless baby.  

I thought briefly of several formerly close friends of mine I can find no reason to forgive, (not one of whom ever tried to apologize, now that I think of it) even though I believe that forgiveness is one of the great blessings of life and the best attitude to have in most situations.  

And then, since this was a memorial service for a Jewish woman who during her almost century-long life always went overboard serving a lot of food,  I went over to the buffet table to see what my next course might be.