The Winter Holiday

The Winter Holiday

Are the holidays here already? Sometimes this season reminds me of the difference between a normal person, a neurotic, and a psychotic. Come morning, the normal person says, “I’m tired. I really don’t want to go to work.” But they get up anyway and off they trudge.

Come morning, the neurotic says, “It’s morning. I really don’t have the energy to live.” And they pull the covers over their heads and go back to moaning sleep.

“Ah,” but the psychotic says, “It can’t be morning; I blew the sun out yesterday.”

It seems it was just yesterday that we dealt with this season. I remember it clearly: smiling through gritted teeth, wishing everyone a happy something while not remembering who they were or why on earth I was speaking to them, and worst of all giving and receiving gifts that were destined for a landfill in some country with no need of more plastic.

No! No! I know what you’re thinking. I am not Scrooge! I do not begrudge others their happiness. Please, feel free to watch all those movies once more, even the ones that were never intended to celebrate the holidays, even the ones that use farcical chipmunk voices and those that save depressed fools from drowning themselves. Make believe that you are home alone, if you wish. Just don’t invite me over to share that mock loneliness. I have better things to do, and they do not include shopping, especially not shopping in crowded malls the day after Thanksgiving.

Holidays shouldn’t be about shopping and spending money anyway. Nor about eating too much or drinking too much. By the way, when are there the most drunk-driving incidents? Wednesday evening before Thanksgiving. Yep. People getting drunk so they can tolerate being with the people they’re supposed to love.

“Well, then,” you might ask, “what should the holiday season be about?”

Gosh, I’m glad you ask me that. Let me start my answer with a big shoutout to seasonal affective disorder. Yes, Virginia, lack of daylight makes us depressed. It especially made our ancestors depressed because they weren’t really sure that winter would pass and that brighter, better-fed times would come. Imagine if you will a group of paleolithic warriors—men and women—dancing around a great monolith to appease a mystical being who might or might not allow the plants to again flower, the water to melt, and the bison or mammoth return to roaming nearby. “Where, by the way,” they undoubtedly wonder, “have all those birds gone?”

No wonder they were grouchy. Being hungry and cold, they were depressed, lethargic a good part of the time, lacking much motivation—except of course when it came to trying to appease that god who controlled the cold wind blowing down from the north.

If we can identify with those hungry, scared cave-dwellers, we might be better able to appreciate what the holiday season could mean: a last-ditch effort to reassure themselves that the world wasn’t going to end, that they weren’t going to starve, that the forces they could not understand would not abandon them.

We all of us, even in these “modern times,” need that reassurance. We turn to tradition so that we know what to expect—albeit now a turkey and canned cranberry sauce instead of the return of the geese. Some of those traditions might still involve a god or two. But, let’s be honest, are people any more enthusiastic about singing Come All Ye Faithful than they are when belting out Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer?

I have no quarrel with our human need for hope and reassurance. I, too, like to glance into the abyss and hope that something will pull me back. Perhaps we speak here of the umbilical cord of the soul. I just don’t displace that basic human need into rooting for my college football team, who may or may not win or even play in a holiday bowl this year. I do not pin my hopes for salvation on a package left under a tree that has been cut down simply to be decorated and discarded in distant memorialization of the logs that ancestors once burned those long and fearful winter nights in the dark wood.

No, in darkness I search not for tokens of religions, nor for their sacraments, not even for the still small voices of their gods. Neither is it the assurance of science I seek, not even a cosmology based on astronomy, the third law of thermodynamics, or the uncertainty of quantum mechanics. At the moment of the abyss, I know that science offers no more certainty for the next moment than faith.

I can, perhaps, turn inward. I can allow my life to flash before me and with a deep sigh perhaps reflect that I have done it my way. Yes, at that moment, I can decide that I have indeed blown out the sun, that perhaps madness makes the most sense after all. Well, if I have to spin another dreidel, sing All I want for Christmas one more time, or even admire another belighted and star-bearing tree resplendent in gaudiness, I will go mad any way.

So, let’s hear for the holy days of psychosis when we realize that it’s all over and doesn’t matter because, well, because we are humans and can make believe that depression is joy and that the ever-shortening days demonstrate hope that tomorrow might just be sunnier.

Are the holidays here already? Sometimes this season reminds me of the difference between a normal person, a neurotic, and a psychotic. Come morning, the normal person says, “I’m tired. I really don’t want to go to work.” But they get up anyway and off they trudge.

Come morning, the neurotic says, “It’s morning. I really don’t have the energy to live.” And they pull the covers over their heads and go back to moaning sleep.

“Ah,” but the psychotic says, “It can’t be morning; I blew the sun out yesterday.”

It seems it was just yesterday that we dealt with this season. I remember it clearly: smiling through gritted teeth, wishing everyone a happy something while not remembering who they were or why on earth I was speaking to them, and worst of all giving and receiving gifts that were destined for a landfill in some country with no need of more plastic.

No! No! I know what you’re thinking. I am not Scrooge! I do not begrudge others their happiness. Please, feel free to watch all those movies once more, even the ones that were never intended to celebrate the holidays, even the ones that use farcical chipmunk voices and those that save depressed fools from drowning themselves. Make believe that you are home alone, if you wish. Just don’t invite me over to share that mock loneliness. I have better things to do, and they do not include shopping, especially not shopping in crowded malls the day after Thanksgiving.

Holidays shouldn’t be about shopping and spending money anyway. Nor about eating too much or drinking too much. By the way, when are there the most drunk-driving incidents? Wednesday evening before Thanksgiving. Yep. People getting drunk so they can tolerate being with the people they’re supposed to love.

“Well, then,” you might ask, “what should the holiday season be about?”

Gosh, I’m glad you ask me that. Let me start my answer with a big shoutout to seasonal affective disorder. Yes, Virginia, lack of daylight makes us depressed. It especially made our ancestors depressed because they weren’t really sure that winter would pass and that brighter, better-fed times would come. Imagine if you will a group of paleolithic warriors—men and women—dancing around a great monolith to appease a mystical being who might or might not allow the plants to again flower, the water to melt, and the bison or mammoth return to roaming nearby. “Where, by the way,” they undoubtedly wonder, “have all those birds gone?”

No wonder they were grouchy. Being hungry and cold, they were depressed, lethargic a good part of the time, lacking much motivation—except of course when it came to trying to appease that god who controlled the cold wind blowing down from the north.

If we can identify with those hungry, scared cave-dwellers, we might be better able to appreciate what the holiday season could mean: a last-ditch effort to reassure themselves that the world wasn’t going to end, that they weren’t going to starve, that the forces they could not understand would not abandon them.

We all of us, even in these “modern times,” need that reassurance. We turn to tradition so that we know what to expect—albeit now a turkey and canned cranberry sauce instead of the return of the geese. Some of those traditions might still involve a god or two. But, let’s be honest, are people any more enthusiastic about singing Come All Ye Faithful than they are when belting out Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer?

I have no quarrel with our human need for hope and reassurance. I, too, like to glance into the abyss and hope that something will pull me back. Perhaps we speak here of the umbilical cord of the soul. I just don’t displace that basic human need into rooting for my college football team, who may or may not win or even play in a holiday bowl this year. I do not pin my hopes for salvation on a package left under a tree that has been cut down simply to be decorated and discarded in distant memorialization of the logs that ancestors once burned those long and fearful winter nights in the dark wood.

No, in darkness I search not for tokens of religions, nor for their sacraments, not even for the still small voices of their gods. Neither is it the assurance of science I seek, not even a cosmology based on astronomy, the third law of thermodynamics, or the uncertainty of quantum mechanics. At the moment of the abyss, I know that science offers no more certainty for the next moment than faith.

I can, perhaps, turn inward. I can allow my life to flash before me and with a deep sigh perhaps reflect that I have done it my way. Yes, at that moment, I can decide that I have indeed blown out the sun, that perhaps madness makes the most sense after all. Well, if I have to spin another dreidel, sing All I want for Christmas one more time, or even admire another belighted and star-bearing tree resplendent in gaudiness, I will go mad any way.

So, let’s hear for the holy days of psychosis when we realize that it’s all over and doesn’t matter because, well, because we are humans and can make believe that depression is joy and that the ever-shortening days demonstrate hope that tomorrow might just be sunnier.

On Love

On Love

On love, thoughts from this man.

Some words mean so much, carry so much emotion that they overwhelm us. Usually, these are words we cannot adequately define. Oh sure, we can look them up in dictionaries, but those definitions don’t do justice to the emotion evoked. One such word is love.

When we are in love, words often become stumbling blocks. We start to tell that special someone about our feelings and even the simplest words turn to tongue twisters, to feeble attempts to express the intensity of our emotions.

We may resort to gestures: flowers, candy, perhaps even lingerie or sexy accessories. We may get down on one knee and propose, usually a commitment called marriage but perhaps just to propose that that so special other person understands we are in—that word again—love with them.

How do we know we are in love? Perhaps it is the sense of preoccupation. That other person is always present in our mind: We dream of them; We want them near to us; We need to know that they are okay. Of course, such concern can take an unhealthy turn, one in which we must be in control, one in which that other person is not loved as separate from us but is felt to be part of us, to belong to us.

True love is preoccupied and protective, but it is not possessive. To love is to want the other to flourish, to individuate, to be the best they can. Even when those we love fail, we are not there to simply pick them up. No, we must help them to pick themselves up and go on. Their growth matters to us.

Those we love need to know that we can share their defeats and continue to love. They need to know that their failures and foibles do not push us away but allow us to better share with them. To love is to know that pain and tears can connect us because there is “no end to the tears of the heart.”

We must always remember that love is the language of possibility and of connection. Love defies time. We may not know what tomorrow will bring, but we have faith in true love that our relationship will endure.

Wishing you a loving relationship so true that it will last forever.

 

 

After Jeremiah 31:16

After Jeremiah 31:16

Did they cry for their mothers?
Pray to a god? Ask for mercy?

Perhaps they died without a sound
not a whimper or tear.

Nobody talks about their actual deaths
about this slaughter of innocents.

We remember them for their could-have-beens­:
hopes, wishes, childhood dreams

delusions of a better place where children
are safe from madmen’s hands.

This one an athlete another a chef;
this one perhaps a dancer, poet, doctor, nurse

a writer of tales a lover of dogs.
Now bloodied and their faces blown away.

Did they wonder why their fathers did not come?
Did they shudder at the popping sounds?

Did their dying bodies jerk
about the classroom’s cold vinyl floor?

I wonder if they cried in pain.
Can we explain to them why
that madman came to school that day?

By Kenneth Weene

 

Good Morning – Goodbye

Good Morning – Goodbye

I say good morning to them all…by name. Do inanimate objects have names? Perhaps even souls? I think so. I greet them in order. First the stuffed animals. Thackeray the sloth is always first. After him, I make the living room rounds. Bloomie, also a stuffed sloth—this one looking like the businessman turned politician—never responds. On the other hand, I refuse to greet his Samoan imaginary followers who somehow live with us—six original delegates to the Democratic convention plus one born here, all he has to show for $500 million spent campaigning. I don’t know their names, only that they insist on ordering imaginary spam for which I refuse to pay.

The list goes on. I won’t tell you all the names, not the categorizations of their being except to mention the last two greetings of each morning. Delores del Rio and Rive Gauche sit beside our comfortable chairs, the ones in which we watch television and in which we plan to die. Delores and Rive have a lot to do with that last statement; they are the means of our self-exiting. Tanks of inert gas, one for my wife and one for myself.

I won’t spell out the methodology for our exits. Suffice it to say that we have studied up and that we are strong supporters of Final Exit Network and a related group, Choice and Dignity, in our home city. When it comes time to exit, I don’t know if I will say goodbye to Thackeray, Bloomie, or any of the other beings, real, imaginary, or in-between, with whom I interact each day. Indeed, at that point I may not remember their names. No longer remembering is one of the metrics I have set out, the measures of when enough of life is enough.

To me, life is a thing of choice and of dignity. I want quality, not quantity. When I can no longer live with the joy and sense of accomplishment that has become my expectation, I will use Rive, my tank, and the accouterments which are stored nearby to end the downward trajectory. Those metrics are the method by which I will measure when the last day has come. Remembering all those names is one of the metrics.

Another might seem rather simple: bending over and picking up a small piece of debris from the floor. That’s a simple act, but when balance and coordination go, the simple becomes difficult. I don’t have to drop something on the floor to test myself. There are enough bits and pieces floating through our lives to provide the test kit without having to think about it. Just pick a bit of paper or a crumb of food that has found its way to the carpet, bend over—albeit with the sense that a can of WD-40 might be in order—and pick it up.

A third is doing my on-line banking. I have three linked accounts. Each morning, I go online and quickly add them. The grand total is my goal. Not because of the money it represents but because it requires some quick mental calculation. Can I estimate the sum or am I befogged by numbers?

For now, just one more daily test. What will I have on my bagel? Today, it was butter and some bacon on the side. There are usually four or five cheese options plus that butter and then there is lox in addition to the bacon. Quick, Ken, what are you having today? Can your mind work that flexibly?

One day, I won’t pass all the tests. Then there will come a day when I fail two. When that happens, it’s time for goodbye. I will give Thackeray a hug. I don’t know if I will remember his name. I won’t hug Bloomie. As for the rest of the crew, well, I have no idea. I only hope I can remember how to hook everything up and how to turn Rive’s valve.

No doubt, you are wondering if I will have Thackeray on my lap when I turn that valve. No. He might try to talk me out of it. I will have my stuffed moose, Potty, on my lap. I know that he won’t try to intervene. He will say, “Whatever,” and kiss my nose. Potty understands that life and death are waystations on an adventure and who are we to know where souls may be found.

BOOKS BY KENNETH WEENE ARE AVAILABLE ON AMAZON CLICK HERE  

The American Divide by Kenneth Weene

The American Divide by Kenneth Weene

The American DivideEarly in my life, my father decided—correctly—that while I was quite intelligent I had some serious perceptual motor limitations. To put it quite simply, I was pretty much uncoordinated. The only question was which was worse, my fine motor skills or my larger muscle coordination. Over time the answer became clear: both.

To address that deficit, Dad bought me a special present for my seventh birthday. What made it special was the cost, far more than he usually spent. It was a Gilbert Erector Set—the fancy one complete with electric motor. His plan was that by building things with me he would get me interested in fine motor activates and that in turn would lead to improvement. Great plan except for fate; fate determined that I got chicken pox just before my birthday. Now, in most homes that would not have been a problem. Since Dad had already had Chicken Pox, there was no reason he and I couldn’t have sat on the floor and built bridges, houses, and especially those wonderful looking grain elevators that decorated the cover of the instruction manual.

However. reason had little to do with our lives, not when my mother was concerned. She decreed that I couldn’t sit on the floor to play until I was completely cured. A draft would assuredly do me in.

So, the alluring red metal box sat unopened for a few days, on each of which my older brother whined that it was unfair that he couldn’t play with this great new toy just because I was sick. In the end, his whining won my mother over and he—not I—got to open the shiny box, unwrap its treasures, and try—Dad happily participating—his hand at building things.

The drawbridge was not the first project, but it was the one I remember. They had finished building it a couple of days before I was pronounced well enough to play. It sat in a corner of the room where my brother could raise and lower the deck to allow imaginary boats to pass beneath or toy cars to pass over the river below. I, of course, wanted to take apart that bridge and build something of my own. It took two more days before I was finally granted permission to disassemble my brother’s bridge. No, he was not about to help.

By that point, Dad had tired of playing with this new toy. He no longer had interest in helping me. I struggled with a couple of simple projects—none anywhere near what my brother had accomplished—and put the Erector Set away. My occupational therapy having accomplished only frustration and a feeling that my brother was the favored child.

To be honest, I have no belief whatsoever that if I had played with that Erector Set, if our father had spent time with me screwing those little girders and plates together, that my perceptual motor skills would have improved. To this day, it feels somewhat miraculous when I accomplish any manual task.

In Boy Scouts, tying knots was a naught. At camp making lanyards from “gimp,” that plastic lacing so popular in those days, resulted in mess. In Junior High School, shop classes were a frustration and source of fear for my teachers; in metal shop I was given a minimum passing grade for staying seated on a stool.

“Kenneth, just don’t touch anything,” was a constant instruction in my life.

On the other hand, I was book smart. I read, read and read more. Also, I loved to discuss ideas. Abstractions lured me the way that balls and, yes, Erector Sets lured other boys. Academic teachers loved me even as shop and gym teachers echoed that mantra, “Kenneth, just don’t touch anything.”

It wasn’t a big problem in those days to be book smart, no stigma attached. Most people earned their livings doing hands-on work. Relatively few people went to college so the possibility that I would end up working with my brain didn’t upset anyone, especially not my Junior High classmates who relished those shop classes. While most of them spent print shop—yes, we were supposed to learn how to set type—happily learning a trade that might end working in the printing plants of publishers of books, magazines, and newspapers, I spent those class hours thinking about the novels I might someday write.

To be fair, I would have to hunt and peck them on a typewriter because nobody could read my scrawl: just another side of that psychomotor nightmare.

Of course, all this happened before what has been called the Third Industrial Revolution, the one driven my micro-electronics. During those earlier times, hands-on was the sine qua non of every product. Machines could not work on their own. Then came transistors and beyond that integrated chips. Just to add an icing on this new industrial cake lasers added even more precision to machine functions. Those talented hands were no longer so necessary. Even in more back-breaking work like mining and agriculture, mechanization was reducing the number of hands required.

If machines were taking on more of the skill in work, lower paid workers overseas could do the jobs at reduced cost even if shipping was required. And, yes, those same circuits made shipping cheaper as well.

Yet another factor diminishing the demand for skilled labor was market saturation. If the roadbuilding splurge of the Eisenhower years led to more automobile demand and sales, soon there were more cars on the road than we needed. And, with those integrated circuits and computerized quality control cars were being driven longer. Air conditioners were soon in every home; which meant that the demand for new equipment dropped. Worse for the skilled workers in America was that the new computerized equipment, cars for example, required less skill in making repairs. Circuit boards were snapped in and out. The fabulous American knack for tinkering was no longer needed be it in the garage or for appliance repairs. Who now, for instance, repairs televisions? Radios? And the list goes on.

Sadly, workers like those kids I went to Junior High with, the ones who excelled in metal shop, print shop, electric shop, and less so but even wood shop, are now less valued. In fact, such skills have become so less valued that those shop classes have been replaced. Another class I was forced to take—and in which I did spectacularly badly—was mechanical drawing. Making blueprints was considered an important, even crucial skill. Today computer programs quickly turn out blueprints that a skilled person would take weeks to draw.

While this computerized degradation of skilled labor was going on, other groups were demanding entry into the workforce. Women, Blacks, Hispanics, and immigrants were all looking for their places at the economic table. White men whose families had for generations earned their way with their hands and backs found themselves being displaced—not gradually but seemingly overnight. Threatened and in fact losing ground, it is no wonder that they were and are still angry.

On the other side, people like me, the ones who went the academic route, have for the most part been at least able to tread water. Perhaps, at some point doctors, teachers, lawyers, engineers, scientists, and even clergy may be replaced by computers. But, that hasn’t happened yet. Still, it might and even some of us live with that threat hanging over us.

The sense of threat and anger fuels politics. When people are comfortable, they don’t bother with voting. Satisfied people simply go on from day to day, at least that’s true of the average satisfied person. But, the times are a-changing and people are no longer contented. Especially those people with that long tradition of hands-on working.

It is those people who have formed the swing vote that threw the last presidential election to Donald Trump. They are not “deplorable” nor inherently hateful, anti-feminist, or racist. They are threatened and angry because their world is getting smaller. They want that sense of satisfaction back. That sense that their lives will be good and their children’s lives even better.

Traditionally, the Democratic Party has tried to speak for those people. It has been the party of Social Security, minimum wage, and unionization. However, it has failed to address this new sense of threat. To a small degree Bernie Sanders tried. He spoke for free college for everyone, which sounds like it should help. However, there are many working people who have a sense that they and their kids don’t belong in college. When Donald Trump speaks of community colleges as a place for vocational training, he is coming closer to the comfort zone of many workers than talking about their kids taking more math, science, English, or especially foreign languages.

Quite simply, the Democratic Party has become the party of the intelligentsia, people like myself with our college degrees and graduate educations. It is not by chance that Bill Clinton presented himself and his wife as two brilliant minds for the price of one or that Barack Obama and his wife had such outstanding educations. The Democratic Party has become a party of thinking and theorizing.

The problem is that for those threatened and angry hands-on workers—yes especially white but those of other hues as well—intellectual arguments are just more proof that they are under attack. To add fuel to that flame, we have the Core Curriculum, a well-thought-out approach to better educating the young to work with computers and in the modern age but a clear threat to those who managed to survive school through rote learning and good shop grades. Another symbol for such people is the disappearance of cursive writing. While that may be a relief to the fine-motor-challenged like myself, it is just another way of telling those workers that their hard-won skills no longer matter.

Clearly, 2016 was the moment when political leaders could address the chasm between intellect and hands, between theory and praxis. I don’t know if Donald Trump understood what he was doing or simply stumbled into it, but he keyed in on just that issue. He positioned himself—no matter how illogically it may be—as the hands-on working stiff whose life was under siege. To her clear discredit, Hillary Clinton never saw the issue that was dividing the country. Since she had taken considerable time off to ready her presidential campaign, her failure to come up with positions that addressed the concerns of that significant portion of America, the part that had so strongly supported her husband, really speaks to her inadequacy as a candidate.

So, where can the Democrats go now? Better yet, where might a new political party go? The best answer may well lie in history. But, it is a side of history that most Americans don’t know and that many big businesses don’t want us to consider. Much of the growth of the American economy has not been a function of private investment. No, that is a myth. The government—often state as well as federal—has been the force—often indirectly but also directly—that has driven our growth and the development of new jobs and opportunities. I’ve already mentioned the road building of the Eisenhower years. However, everywhere we look there is the hand of government. Even the growth of semiconductors and integrated circuits would never have taken off were there not both pressure and investment from the military. Of course, perhaps the best example was in the nineteenth century when federal lands were used to finance and give purpose to the railroads.

The problem with the American economic system is that we have come to regard corporations as gods. We have this fantasy that they create jobs and new ideas. We want to believe that the pursuit of profits will always determine good decision-making. When there is a clear market, corporations do an excellent job. Why wouldn’t they? Years ago, when studying economics, I read about how in Russia the state-run businesses couldn’t make intelligent decisions. My favorite example was the production of only one size bra. Obviously, a private corporation would have been making a better decision as it tried to increase sales and profits rather than presumably limiting costs.

But, when it comes to seeing the future, existing corporations often are too busy playing it safe. Even when they do research and development, say in the drug industry, they are more concerned that every new product ends up making money than taking real development risks.

Looking to the future should be the goal of government. Of course, if there is too much link between existing corporations and government—certainly the case today—that function is compromised. Maintenance of the status quo becomes the goal. That is what has happened in America. As a result, instead of new growth in hands-on employment in manufacturing equipment for renewable energy and faster transport systems in America, those areas are being developed in other countries. There is no development of new techniques in damming, something that will be essential as sea levels rise. Nor have we been investing in new localized and indoors methods of agriculture as have the Dutch and other European nations.

Instead of calling for a new wave of American driven technology and resulting manufacture, the intellectual politicians of the left have focused on a more just society, one in which everyone receives at least minimal levels of freedom and purchasing power. Quite simply, justice—while one of the highest goals for any society—can only be pursued in a state in which people do not feel threatened. When humans feel under siege they are less willing to worry that the other person be treated fairly and more concerned that they not lose ground themselves.

Whilst I may not be able to do much with my hands or back, I do know that my fellow Americans who can deserve the opportunities and recognition that they desire just as much as those of us who hold PhDs and other degrees do. For now, that is the divide that must be addressed

BOOKS BY KENNETH WEENE ARE AVAILABLE ON AMAZON CLICK HERE  

Spinoza and Me by Kenneth Weene

Spinoza and Me by Kenneth Weene

It was Tuesday afternoons, two-fifteen almost every Tuesday for the school year – for my seventh-grade school year. They would leave – dismissed early from school to attend religious instruction. Most, the vast majority of my classmates would leave to learn about God, to learn about faith, to learn about dogma. Almost universally they were Catholics. The city in which I grew up was almost entirely Catholic – half of Irish background and half of Italian ­– but all Catholic and all scheduled for confirmation.

​Off our classmates would go in mass exodus, and we – a small number – would huddle in our respective homerooms while being watched – as questionable minorities must be.

​The remainder of the school day was designated a period for “guidance and moral education.” We were given neither guidance nor moral education. Instead, we huddled in our minority and did homework. My homeroom teacher taught English so we did English homework. Next door was a social studies teacher. His minority worked on geography and memorized facts about our city, Somerville, our county, Middlesex, and our commonwealth, Massachusetts. On the other side of our room was a math teacher; there fractions and equations held sway. Therein lay one of the basic moral lessons of my youth – free will may exist, but free choice does not.

So we, in our suspicious minority status, sat quietly and tried to appear compliant – to appear as a well-disciplined and obedient unity. There was only one problem: we were not a unity. For within our small number there was yet another division, another even smaller minority, a minority of one, of me, a Jew. The Catholics were gone; the Protestants ­– undifferentiated from the vantage point of the Vatican – had become the majority. I, I alone, was left – left to be different. “Hebe,” “Kike,” “Shylock”: I heard all those epithets and more while growing up; but the worst was “Jewww” pronounced with hash J and drawn-out W – pejorative in its correctness. Make no doubt about it; I was the hated “Jewww,” the killer of Christ, wearer of devils’ horns, killer of Christian children and consumer of their blood – ah, blood-libeled matzoth.

​It was not easy being a Jew in that classroom, in that school, in that city. There had been a time when the numbers had been different. If Jews had never been the majority, they had once been a serious minority, but that had changed. Most had moved away – across Boston to Brookline and Newton – on the other end of the transit system. Only the temple remained to let the world know that they, a number of them – us, had once lived there. It was a solid building of granite and cement, a building as substantial as one of the many churches that serviced the rest of the community.

But, inside, within the people, within what survived of the congregation, little substance remained. Commitment had gone with the members – gone to those newer and wealthier communities. A few stragglers, a few professional men whose careers required them to stay, a few old people with neither the means nor the will to move: this was the congregation. And, it was led by a rabbi whose lack of standing was consistent with the temple’s ever diminishing stature.

​Leo Shubow had nothing to recommend him. He wasn’t particularly learned, he lacked charisma, he spoke poorly, and, just to make things worse, he sprayed spittle with every sibilant. There were those who opined that Rabbi Shubow would not even had merited our small congregation were it not for his brother, a well-known and highly respected rabbi who not only led but also dominated one of the most important temples in all of Greater Boston. This successful rabbi had demanded a congregation for his inadequate sibling; presumably, it had been decided that he could do the least harm in our already failed flock.

​My father, one of those professional men who felt that they needed to stay in Somerville, insisted my brother and I attend some religious education. For their part neither of our parents ever went to the temple except for those rare but socially mandatory bar mitzvahs and weddings. Very few adults did go to temple. At most services the required minyan was a last-minute miracle.

​It was probably just as well that almost no adults attended services; Rabbi Shubow had only two topics on which he could comfortably sermonize:

​The first was the need to support the just-born nation of Israel. He would particularly exhort us to give coins to plant trees there. Presumably he thought it would be too political to ask us to help buy weapons for the fledgling Israeli army. Nevertheless, underlying our understanding of the importance of those trees was our dread of the incomprehensible hatred that had become the irresistible tide of the holocaust. Even in our small community, each of us in some way was connected to the dead of Europe and to the precious saved – that minority who had survived the camps – and to those among them who were trying to make a new home – a refuge – for themselves in Eretz Israel.

​His second topic had nothing discernable to do with Israel or Judaism. He was passionate about the threat of icebergs in the North Atlantic. I never learned if he had lost somebody to an iceberg-related sinking or had simply been traumatized as a very small boy by the end of the Titanic. Whatever the reason, he would speak at length – poorly, but at length – about the need for a better warning system to protect sailors.

​His preoccupation seemed somewhat silly to those of us who bothered to think about those icebergs. The world was still reeling from the war. Oceans of blood had been spilled. Even if one were to think of death in the North Atlantic, it made more sense to focus on the torpedoes of the Nazis than on the icebergs breaking away from Greenland and Iceland.

​I would probably have no adult thought of Leo Shubow were it not for a book that he suggested I read. That year – that year of confirmations – I read the book he had suggested. It wasn’t a very sophisticated book, but it did raise an interesting question. Could one be a bad Jew and still be a great Jew? Felix Mendelssohn, the great composer, was one example. Shabbetai Zvi, the false messiah, was another. But, the most important example was Baruch de Spinoza.

​That book didn’t teach me much about Spinoza – the brilliant Sephardic Jew who had been expected to become an important rabbi but who, instead, was perceived by his community as doubting the very existence of God. Still trying to come to grips with the Inquisition that had driven them from Spain and that had killed so many of their fellow religionists, the Sephardic community in Holland was deeply religious, strongly observant, and extremely intellectual. Spinoza’s perceived apostasy was an outrage.

​Ostracized and (very unusually for a Jew) excommunicated, he had made his living as a grinder of lenses, some of the best lenses available in Holland. He had also written brilliantly in his attempts to understand whatever he could of the essential nature of the world and to define mankind’s ethical obligations. Although he had remained outside the Jewish fold, Spinoza had become the spiritual father of the modern age. His simple abode was to become a place of pilgrimage for modern thinkers – perhaps most notably Einstein, who stopped there during his flight from Europe to America – his escape from the Nazis.

​Spinoza ground lenses, at that time one of the purest mathematical activities. Using mathematical formulae, light could be forced into orderly behavior. Einstein went beyond that; he applied mathematics to the understanding of light and to the fundamental physical nature of the world. Shubow was not so brilliant. He could only worry about seeing the physical dangers in the natural world, but he, like Spinoza and Einstein, understood that the physical world could be known – that the dangers inherent in it could be understood and perhaps overcome.

​Precision of mathematical and scientific thinking could give mankind control over nature. It was not necessary to invoke God, nor was it meaningful to think of God as intervening in that nature – given by Him or perhaps more properly synonymous with Him. To appreciate that order, to truly appreciate it, was to love God, to be – in Spinoza’s phrase – intoxicated with God.

​But, mankind is often more intoxicated with itself than with God. It is our nature that we see threat in the mirror of existence and turn on our fellow humans over and over again. Human nature is not so predictable nor so beautiful. It turns us against minorities and thereby against ourselves. We may call it prejudice and hatred, for my part I call it Evil.

​The Inquisition was rooted in Evil as was the Holocaust. There was Evil in that classroom, too. Sitting there on those Tuesday afternoons so acutely aware of being a minority within a minority I was at once both a victim of that Evil and a participant in it.

​Rabbi Shubow had lived with enough Evil to appreciate the goal of goodness – to understand nature and use that knowledge to save man. Now I am older. I have lived with enough Evil to wonder if man is worth saving. And I have lived with enough of mankind to wonder if mankind can save itself. Perhaps it is enough to appreciate human nature, to study the psychological world, and to accept that our species may well reach its own self-doomed end.

​There is creation, there is nature, and there is man. For all these there is order, that most divine of all possibilities. Order exists. I revel in that fact and I am too intoxicated with God to think of praying for heavenly intervention.

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