silk robes for all to see.
To be credible, journalism can’t afford to be harmless.
One day I wrote a tract in which I examined the link between political conservatism and the spirited patronage the death penalty seems to gain in times of recession and popular discontent. I suggested that no one likes to squeeze through the narrow door of austerity -- especially the rich. I added that the fans of capital punishment surely harbor in their soul of souls the terrifying fear that they themselves might be murderers. I called capitalism a dogma that sacrifices the masses at the altar of personal profit -- I called it a form of legal cannibalism. These convictions, which I continue to embrace, did not prevent me from describing “communism” as a doctrine that recruits the maladjusted and the malcontent and sacrifices them at the altar of the Party.
“How else do you awaken a dormant conscience,” I once fired back at an editor, “if not by prying eyes open and dousing them with acid? If man does not peer into the heart of darkness, if he refuses to confront evil and crush it, why should God?” The editor had responded by tearing up my essay. This would not be the last affirmation that “freedom of the press” belongs to those who own the presses.
Later, in my novels, I would tell truths that only fiction can safely exhume and ventilate. I would continue to pay dearly for indulging this vice: it cost me jobs and friendships, it pissed off some of my relatives and earned me warnings and threats. But I remained habituated, less for the fleeting high it produced than out of regard for all the unpopular causes I had espoused, some out of conviction, others out of spite. I was also fearful of losing the modest notoriety I had worked so hard to achieve. I was getting published. At last, I had a byline, an audience. Protecting such ego-boosting assets would exact an effort all out of proportion with the satisfaction they produced. Instead of catering to my craft, I was now busy feeding an insatiable momentum of self-renewal-by-retaliation. No sooner had one of my columns created the desired effect -- shock, indignation or sheer horror at the medley of human miseries I chronicled -- than I would fire off a riposte. I took no prisoners. Eventually, a youthful fantasy -- a Faustian pact -- would shackle a once happy dilettante to a tiresome reflex. Having to earn a living at a hobby, in my case, would eventually spoil the fun. But I kept going just to see how far it would get me. I lay down my arms when age, decrepitude and nausea toward society turned the agent provocateur into an exhausted hermit.
*
Ironically, an education had delivered my father into another kind of servitude, one that would call for an even greater degree of devotion and submission than the disciplines endured in his childhood’s confining theocratic milieu. Proud, principled, mindful of his reputation, he would spend the rest of his life obeying the Hippocratic Oath. He was indeed an excellent physician. He would have been an excellent astronomer, tailor or blacksmith if that’s what he’d aimed to be. An unwavering sense of duty would have given dignity and worth to any task he undertook. He would have worked long and hard to refine needed skills. He would have peered into the blackness of space until his eyes gave out, crafted the smartest apparel, fashioned the finest horseshoes until exhaustion had weakened his grip. But I know of no occupation that could have filled him with lasting satisfaction. Medicine did not. The career that was to free him from the bonds of destitution would become an encumbrance, a liability and a moral constraint he would scrupulously endure for more than fifty years. When my mother died of pancreatic cancer in 1973, my father exclaimed, “Fuck medicine” and retired. Uttered with equal doses of despair and relief, the expletive epitomized his frustration at the frailty of life and the maddening inexactitude of medical science. It also summed up the emotional toll daily issues of life and death had claimed on a restless man convinced of the futility of existence.
“Humanity is an absurd happenstance and a calamity. If Sisyphus weren't so busy rolling his rock up the hill he'd be laughing his head off at us. But wait, he is us.”
A lifetime of empathy, repaid with indifference or unkindness, had found him exhausted, depleted. Caring too deeply, he’d discovered, can bruise the heart and harden the soul. The “long shortcut to nowhere” had turned him inside out and left him empty and vulnerable.
*
Unlike Wiesel, my father invested neither pride nor mysticism in his origins. He first toyed with the idea that Jews may have been predestined to martyrdom. He quickly rejected that notion and concluded that suffering is universal and indiscriminate, and begins at birth for both man and beast. Although he would never think of himself as anything but a Jew, his Jewishness was circumstantial, utterly devoid of affectation; it lacked the visceral transcendentalism his father and grandfather had attached to their faith.
An ant doesn’t wonder why it isn’t a butterfly.
“I didn’t ask why I’m a Jew. I still don’t. It would be ‘un-Jewish’ of me to ask such an absurd question. I am what I’ve created. My whole is larger than the sum total of my hereditary parts.”
It was this repudiation of an unalterable fate, of a fixed and inevitable future -- bolstered by his view of the world as a godless and irrational affair of ceaseless striving and affliction -- that led my father to shake the last congenital remnants of religiosity. He would also abjure the Kabbalah, in which he had dabbled in his youth. Like his father before him, he’d spent countless hours “meandering in stupefied fascination” through its cerebral minefields. Ultimately, it was the Kabbalah’s hyper-deterministic character that prompted my father to dismiss this, the most arcane of all Jewish mystical systems as “a disquieting pastime for the idle, borderline monomaniacs or candidates for lunacy.” The Kabbalah, he would conclude, not only trivializes human hopes, knowledge, dreams and the legitimacy of voluntary action or inaction, it effectively discourages rational and deliberate action of any kind. Any system that pledges to temper human perplexities and lead to enlightenment through occultism, he held, delivers false hope and culminates in disillusionment.
“A real man doesn’t submit to his maker’s caprices. He takes risks; he defies them.” In this bitter admonition I recognized both a veiled rebuke of his own father, a theosophist who fought boredom and sought refuge from his own inadequacies in the Kabbalah’s vaporous realm, and a warning to his only son -- me -- to stand tall and yield to no one.
*
Suspended midway between waning faith and waxing reason, an old friend, a Southern Christian, had once wistfully mused that “people seem to need religion. Who knows, society might collapse without it.” Coming to his senses, he’d quickly added, “Of course, the more hocus-pocus and melodrama religion delivers, the more persuasive its canons become.”
Yes, I reckoned. The grand spectacle of religious rituals, the trance-like paroxysms of Hassidic worship, the necromantic melodrama of the Catholic Mass, the boisterous exuberance of “born-again” evangelical revivals, the numinous meditation of Muslim devotion -- all enthrall the faithful and they keep coming back for more. Need is often the product of habituation. Religion is a one-way dialectic, a maudlin soliloquy. Our incantations and histrionics are met with a stone-cold silence from which echoes, we are told, the sum total of all truths.
Religion punishes the present to expiate the future.
“Faith” is first infused in an unsullied psyche then reinforced through repetition, the discipline of fear and the expectation of otherworldly rewards. I doubt mankind would wander in a spiritual desert without God, but this was one assumption my friend was not quite ready to accept. He still believes in the existence of a “God molecule,” an inbred predisposition woven into our DNA that makes us look heavenward not only for our roots but for our salvation. I would have gladly toyed with my friend’s proposition were it not for the nagging fact that I and many people I know don’t seem to possess the slenderest wisp of spirituality in our genes.
*
I was brought up in an ambiance utterly lacking religious affectations. An absence of casual or ritualistic spirituality at home did not create a void in my life and, as I tell anyone willing to listen, I found the concept of an omnipotent, unseen and ineffable, unknowable creator/judge/destroyer preposterous even as a child. Yes, I would embark