Spiritual Envy. Michael Krasny

the noblest of virtues, but the great Jewish philosopher Maimonides pointed out that the highest form of charity derived from an absence of egoistic desire and an absence of hope that others would recognize one’s charitable deeds. How was it possible to eliminate such motives? Well, what about the case of sir Nicholas Winton, who set up a rescue operation in Prague in 1938? He was a twenty-nine-year-old London stockbroker who personally saved the lives of hundreds of mostly Jewish children by finding funds for their transport to safety and for their repatriation or foster care. He told no one. Not even his wife, Grete, knew of his heroic deeds until 1988, when she discovered a scrapbook of old correspondence he had kept.

      I went one day, as an undergraduate, with a group of fraternity brothers to an orphanage and spent an afternoon playing with and giving piggyback rides to orphans. I left feeling good about what I’d done and about myself, but I also reflected that the Polaroids taken of me with various orphans on my back would come in handy to show girls what a swell guy I was. I wondered, though, how genuine such acts could be if they were done partly because of a need for the approval of oneself or others. Was intention immaterial? Should my code be dictated by circumstance, and should it shift according to need or desire? I was forming a code but had serious doubt even about shaping a code, especially one that could come close to being absolute or pure. But I was also trying to lay claim to my own commandments, my own guideposts, ones whose source and moral force was not the God I had lost but the one I still hoped to find.

       Chapter 4

       WHERE IS GOD?

       More on Codes and God’s Place in Mine

      Trying to fashion a personal code from a crazy quilt of different readings and perceptions and experiences and feelings presented far more challenges than simply following the Ten Commandments. My heritage I considered Hebraic, despite Koestler’s notion that Russian Jews like me were descended from the Khazars. I studied many of the Talmudists and significant Jewish thinkers like Maimonides (“Teach thy tongue to say I do not know”), Rashi, and Spinoza, and a wide range of poets, including the great English poet Matthew Arnold, who established a cultural and philosophic division between the Hebraic and the Hellenistic. But I also wanted, as a young college student, to look to the Greeks — to Plato especially but also to Socrates, Aristotle, Zeno, Heraclitus, Epicurus, and Epictetus.

      Arnold pointed out that Hebraism and Hellenism are polar opposites. He simplified the dichotomy between the two by observing that the former was tied to the moral impulse and the concept that sin and desire hindered right action, while the latter was all about the belief that intellectual impulse, beauty, and desire hindered right thinking. The Hebrews were about strictness of consciousness and conquest over the self, whereas the Greeks were about spontaneity of consciousness and seeing things as they really were. Could these be synthesized? Could Nietzsche’s Apollonian and Dionysian? Could reason and emotion? East and West? Did duality need synthesis?

      Whatever fragments I could press into service as part of an ethical code, I included as guideposts, though absolutes soon enough seemed unquestionably out of the question, simply because there were too many antipodes, too much dualism. My Jewish tradition had its split between the Misnagdim, or rational tradition, and the more mystical chassidic tradition, two utterly different ways of seeking and perceiving God. The Misnagdim were cerebral and analytic, while the Chassi-dim wanted to feel God in the viscera or, as the Yiddish would have it, the kishkas. The one tradition was much more bound up in study, and the other in miracles and vision. But both sought God.