Читать книгу A Paler Shade of Red: Memoirs of a Radical - W. E. Gutman - Страница 16

LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON

My great-great-grandfather, Abraham Gutman, was also born in Sighet, a small town in northern Transylvania, not far from the Hungarian border. His grandfather may have migrated from Poland or the Ukraine. Abraham's son Fabian, my father’s grandfather, lost his mother when he was just a child. Thirty days after his wife's death, having complied with tradition by engaging in histrionic displays of mourning, lamentations, breast-beatings and tearful one-way dialogues with God, Abraham remarried. His new spouse, Rivka, a pretty, young orphan he’d been screwing when his wife wasn’t looking, produced three children. Fabian was just a teen when he was apprenticed to a soap and candle factory many kilometers from home. He carried bitter memories of his childhood well into adulthood and once told my father, tears streaming from his eyes, of the indignities he suffered at the hands of his father’s new wife. When he went home for brief visits he would be fed leftovers and forced to sleep in the attic in the stifling heat of summer or on bitter winter nights. His stepmother made him do degrading chores and took pleasure in humiliating him in front of her own children.

“Like his Biblical namesake, my father Abraham,” Fabian claimed until the day he died of a heart attack in the arms of his mistress, “gave in to his wife’s frivolity and meanness. He never intervened. I was not cast out into the desert, like Ishmael; I was abandoned in a barren field of desolation where love and tenderness did not grow.”

Calumny or cry from the heart? The truth would turn out to be more sinister.

Memory may have holes, be short, sometimes even blocked. In the end it is always deformed.

*

Conscious of his heritage, painfully chained to his lot, my father would neither seek nor find comfort in the very device that gave Jews their identity, favored their survival -- religion. As a child he complied with its elaborate rituals and conformed to its stringent mandates, brutishly and without reaping the slightest spiritual gratification.

"I waited for the high holy days, not as re-affirmations of the Jewish ideal but in anticipation of a better meal.”

Like other Jewish children, he’d worn peyes and attended Cheder, the elementary Hebrew school where he was taught to read the Pentateuch and other sacred works -- a formality to which he submitted without eagerness or fervor out of filial piety, along with a hundred other daily conventions and obligations.

“Impoverished parents show love by providing food and clothing. Caresses, kisses and embraces are in very short supply, dispensed on rare occasions and with extreme parsimony. Impoverished children redeem themselves by obeying their parents and submitting to their lot with cheerful self-effacement. Suffering dilutes a child’s capacity to love. I did what I was told to do. We all did. Conformity and measured indifference, I learned, will get a child through anything: boredom, endless chores, long hours of rote study, not enough sleep, even the nagging urge to turn tail and run as far as your legs will take you.”

“Did you ever run away,” I asked.

Absconding would have been out of character for my father, an inconceivable act of betrayal against his parents and siblings. They needed each other “the way parasites need their host.” Each fed on an enormous well of collective emotion when his or her own was depleted. It was his family’s sole defense against the vast and incomprehensible universe that stretched beyond the walls of their little town.

“No,” he sighed. “But I thought about it with nagging frequency. I dreamed of places I’d only read about. Late at night, in the glow of a small kerosene lamp, I thumbed through picture books, fascinated, lusting for the wonders that unfolded with every page: Budapest, Vienna, Rome, Paris, New York. I longed to be delivered from the stifling sameness of my life. I would eventually earn my independence by getting an education. It was one hell of a long shortcut to nowhere.”

“What do you mean by ‘nowhere’?”

My father looked away.

“It’s hard to explain. I don’t know if you’d understand.”

I understood perhaps better than he could ever imagine, with a keenness and sensitivity only heredity, empathy and similarity of circumstance can inspire. Like father, like son. I too had taken shortcuts. Some led straight to a precipice. Unlike my father, I’d defied reason and sidestepped convention, veering away from a course I knew I was not qualified to navigate. Fearing failure, I’d circumvented well-trodden lanes and cut my own footpaths. (I often boasted that I thrived on adventure when, in fact, it was a fear of commitment or a lack of faith in the constancy of my own objectives that catapulted me from one castle-building venture to another). Insufficiently schooled, ill-suited for commerce, undisciplined and ferociously eclectic, I would drift into journalism less by conscious choice than a happy confluence of wishful thinking and naiveté, youthful immodesty and self-created opportunities. Necessity, in my case, was the mother of invention. I enjoyed writing -- no, I liked to test the limits of forbearance, to indict, to bait. I was seduced by controversy, polemics, and I would invent myself bit by bit: part-chronicler, part agitator. The pleasure I derived from telling inconvenient truths surpassed any possible urge to inform or enlighten. I treated facts as props, words as projectiles; I relied on the mood they’re apt to convey. I am and have always been a good visualizer and words evoke strong images. I used surreal colors. I savored the vibes they were meant to provoke. It was the disquiet or indignation that my essays might elicit that found me pen in hand. I cared little for the Fourth Estate or the public it serves. I had one objective: to cause unease and discomfiture, to unnerve, to remind the gullible and the smug that the emperor was still naked, and to parade the son of a bitch bare-assed and trembling in his imaginary brocades and gold-embroidered 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 on my own “mystical journey” and immerse myself in the study of Zen, the Tao, Tantric Buddhism, Hinduism, Shinto. Like my father before me, I’d spent countless hours “meandering in stupefied fascination” through the Kabbalah’s cerebral minefields. The leaps of comprehension, not to mention the leaps of faith the Kabbalah demands, would leave me exhausted and confused. However enthralling, my excursions were inspired by a need to know, not a need to belong.

“I think, therefore I doubt,” I’d exclaimed at last when I awoke from a blinding sleep and shed the last vestiges of forbearance for senseless beliefs. Nine-tenths of my family had perished in Hitler’s gas chambers and the “inscrutability of God’s designs,” at best an offensive rationale, had since acquired the stench of a loathsome affront. I rejected the notion that man is born sullied by some “primal offense,” that pain ennobles the soul and that sentient beings need to be ruled by an arbitrary system of faith-based values and protocols. In religion’s imaginary goodness, I discovered not a path to enlightenment but an instrument of deceit and emotional enslavement. The transformation from fence-straddler to mutineer was gradual, filled with misgivings. At first, I found religion’s mystique inscrutable. I’d meandered through its occluded allegories and bizarre canons like an explorer in a strange, uncharted wasteland. I’d glimpsed the very faint light that religion claims to shed but found only vast and gloomy shadows. It is in the shadows that my senses, now accustomed to the darkness, caught sight of a glow, a radiant luminosity that rinsed my pupils free of the gritty debris of credulity. I now understood that blind faith, not truth; prejudice and fear, not common sense, threaten humankind and condemn it to bondage.

Like others before me, I’d absent-mindedly tolerated sundry propositions and viewpoints along the way, some of which I even peddled, parrot-like, out of stupidity or intellectual sloth, not for the intrinsic virtues with which they were ostensibly endowed.

Assembly-line rearing, fashionable in the days of my youth, had instilled a value system that seemed strange if not utterly without merit. I’d been coached by otherwise doting parents to defer to authority with robot-like reverence. Be polite; do not innovate. Honor your elders. Respect your teachers. Salute your superiors. Obey the boss. Comply with the mandates of the public order. In short, I was to idolize or at least yield to all species of adults of dubious pedigree who had by now forgotten what it feels like to look at a very menacing world from three feet off the ground.

In school, I’d been programmed by coldhearted masters to smile or fight back the tears, to subdue, sometimes to smother very raw feelings under the pretext that such perfunctory bearing is what society expects of a good little boy and later, of a mensch. Precocious and sly, I knew I was not and could never be a good little boy. Nor did I aspire to menschhood, a status not clearly defined or imagined at the time. But I understood that pretending to do what others anticipate -- feigning religion, simulating approval of orthodox concepts, conforming to time-honored trends -- can bring on small rewards or, at the very least, shield one from censure, reprimand or retribution -- all of which I eventually incurred when I tired of pretending and transitioned at last from conciliation and irresolution to open defiance.

Later, as my peripheral vision improved and my depth perception sharpened, I began to ask questions: Why are we susceptible to pain and defenseless against the fury of disasters -- natural and manmade -- that, religion insists, are wrought against us “for mysterious reasons” by some fickle supernatural force? Who is this “maker” who inflicts (or tolerates) atrocities for “the good that comes from them”? What cunning and irreducible absolute orchestrates without apparent aim -- or turns a blind eye to -- the paroxysms that convulse his realm? What “intelligent designer” remains stone-silent while the sobs of his creation are never heard? What “ineffable” entity is this, whose ear is inattentive and whose breast is unfaithful to the throngs who call on him and seek his succor? What perverted despot decrees that his subjects will recite words not their own, that they will blindly obey the injunctions of self-anointed envoys, tremble at their threats and admonitions, mouth off supplications and jeremiads and parrot guilt-ridden prayers of indebtedness and veneration, all repeated ad nauseum, day after day, to a God who never shows his face, never bares his heart, never sheds a tear, never says he's sorry, a God who grants life and, with it, the fear of death?

The questions, mulled over when I was still very young, were in fact declaratory statements conjugated in the interrogative. This I believe: at best, religion is divisive, repressive, irrational and detrimental to the pursuit of harmony among men. It belongs, if at all, in houses of worship or at home. It has no place in the bedroom, schools and government, much less in the crafting of a national psyche or the shaping of policy. At its worst, it’s a form of psychosis.

Karl Marx was right. “Religion is the opiate of the people.” But unlike opium, which surrenders users to a state of blissful lethargy, religion inflames passions and brings the worst in man. The sectarian hatreds and paroxysms of ferocious religiosity that convulse the planet epitomize religion’s toxic character. Eventually, I would conclude that “God” is a useless and costly hypothesis with which I could dispense. And crypto-agnosticism turned into overt atheism.

Atheists don’t wage wars to protect their right not to believe. There may come a time when they must.

*

Late in life, overwhelmed and bewildered by the Kabbalah’s abstruseness, repelled by “the effeminacy of mysticism,” my father sought succor and guidance from the “undeviating honesty of realism.” In time, he would also turn away from the rich Yiddish literature he had savored in his youth, describing it as “insular, ethnocentric and self-absorbed.” Told and retold, Hassidic tales, with their subtle masochism, their sly subordination to divine will and fatalism toward human evil, seemed to magnify and reaffirm the Jewish “shtettel” [small-town] mentality he had fought so hard to escape. He would continue to read the Bible, however, until the end of his life. Far from seeking comfort, he was looking to discredit hallowed heroes -- Abraham, David and Joshua (he called them “thugs”), to challenge cherished convictions by pointing to the recorded lies, the betrayals, the greed, the violence, the cruelty, the bestial godlessness of man, the insufferable inhumanity of God. Proclaiming that all human actions and “godly edicts” are motivated by abject self-interest, he would find in the ancient texts the ammunition he needed to launch vitriolic attacks against the very lore that had suffused his childhood. Among his most contentious compositions was a stinging pastiche in which he lampooned the Biblical Abraham for his lack of moral fiber -- “the man had no balls” -- and derided his wife, Sarah, for her conceit and heartlessness. He characterized their ingratitude toward their host, the Pharaoh, as “harlotry.”

Having concluded that man is stimulated by instinct, selfishness and greed, and that “divine edicts” are “fantastical aberrations,” he attacked the beliefs and traditions of his people. The piece was published in a Jewish periodical in New York, drawing instant fury from scores of readers.

Accused of heresy by fellow Jews, many of them fellow Sigheters, my father would find further evidence of human vanity and intolerance in their attitude, a revelation that inevitably engendered fresh assaults -- and earned him further scorn and alienation.

A short time before he died, reflecting on his own metamorphosis, no doubt troubled by mine, he counseled against reckless pursuits and glib conclusions.

Seeking the truth is not a spectator sport. Do it in private, alone with your conscience, shielded from partisan influences and purged of all acquired knowledge.

The truth he’d referred to was several orders of magnitude removed from mine. I can only imagine how painful it must have been for him to watch the comforting warmth of imparted beliefs irrevocably replaced by the chilling emptiness of reason. In the end, hollowed out, he had sought asylum in a vacuum that could never be filled. I must find comfort in the hope that he may have died at odds with the world but at peace with himself.

Thought cannot distance itself from its point of origin. The mind is incapable of self-scrutiny.

*

I come from a household where the word “God” was never uttered -- except as an exclamation -- and death or the hereafter had no place at the dinner-table, either in a mystical or existential context. I was never given a religious education, nor deprived of such, and the notion of an invisible, omnipotent creator/arbiter/destroyer seemed ludicrous to me even as a boy. By the time I was old enough to reflect on the enormity of my parents’ suffering, especially during the German occupation of France, their indifference to religion had turned to embittered antagonism -- my father’s early childhood religious upbringing and my mother’s genteel, pseudo-assimilation into a Christian mainstream notwithstanding. Struck with pancreatic cancer, my mother had endured several months of martyrdom and died convinced that religion is a travesty and a fraud. Heartbroken, my father, a physician, grieved at the fragility of the human body and railed against the staggering imperfection of medical science. He spent the rest of his days in the company of a cantankerous cat mourning my mother and perusing and annotating the Bible -- the Old Testament (he considered the New Testament a preposterous fantasy, its final chapter, the Book of Revelation, the ghastly hallucinations of a psychopath) -- not to seek inspiration or comfort, but to vilify it, to find the contradictions and highlight the aberrations, to poke a wrathful finger at God’s unfathomable cruelty, to denounce man’s limitless taste for evil.

My father and I had often chatted long into the night about religion. We were not in pursuit of salvation; our tête-à-têtes were simply exercises in pure reasoning. We agreed that the underpinnings of religion -- mysticism, the supernatural, the credo quia absurdum (I believe BECAUSE it is absurd), faith in an invisible entity, the rituals, the taboos, the hellish penalties -- had all been contrived to enslave man, not to free him. We acknowledged the outwardly chivalrous but simplistic precepts of the “Golden Rule,” or Ethic of Reciprocity, present in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (but probably of more ancient Buddhist provenance) but pointed at man’s inclination to ignore it, even violate it, in the name of Yahweh, Theo and Allah. We quoted from Hillel the Elder, the 1^st century BCE rabbi who summed up the Torah with the command, “What is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor.” We read Luke (6:31), which teaches, “Treat others as you want them to treat you.” Last, we turned to the Koran’s lofty counsel, “No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother that which he desires for himself.”

But “others,” “neighbor” and “brother,” we surmised, have a parochial meaning that, history has shown, signifies “those of our own kind -- us, not them.”

This dichotomy would be astutely dissected two decades later by journalist Christiane Amanpour in CNN’s God’s Warriors: The Clash Between Piety and Politics. Rebroadcast several times since its first airing in August 2007, the three-part award-winning documentary offers a disturbing rendering of the three major religions’ penchant for violence in the service of deity. It also lays bare their unceasing effort to manipulate civil society through indoctrination, intimidation, civil disobedience and, all else failing, swift, copious bloodshed.

Carried to its extremes, God’s Warriors had shown, religion is a dangerous eccentricity that will render men insane. Only religious delirium could inspire a Muslim to plot the “honor killing” of his own daughter, or to bomb a disco filled with Jewish youths. Only mystical rapture could lead a self-styled Christian to murder doctors performing legal abortions. Only a Jewish zealot could violate the Torah, slaughter Muslims gathered in prayer in their mosque, torch cars on the Sabbath or assault members of a peaceful Gay Pride parade and threaten violence if the Jerusalem police chief allowed the pageant to proceed.

This is the bare face of religion, my father and I had concluded. This is how religion transforms men into zombies, societies into citadels of intolerance, incubators in which simmers the hatred of heretics -- those who, according to the Vatican, ”hold different beliefs” or grant themselves the inalienable right to hold none. Within that conflict rests the unresolved tension between the command to “love one's enemies” and the equally strong injunction to reject and eradicate any alien or divergent dogma. In the final analysis, my father and I had reasoned, neither Jew, nor Christian or Muslim knows which of the two directives to follow at any given time. By attacking “heretics” as tools of Satan, religious fanatics seize the rhetorical high ground and shift the focus from embracing one’s fellow man to the escapist option of waging war against an imaginary but prescriptive source of evil.

This catch 22 was the preeminent rationale for a succession of gruesome confrontations in which only Yahweh, Theo or Allah could triumph: the Crusades, the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, the Inquisition, the 30-Years War, the centuries-old strife in Northern Ireland, the Armenian and Jewish Holocausts, the Hutu-Tutsi reciprocal slaughter, the Hindu-Moslem-Sikh rivalries in India and Kashmir, the bloodbath in Sudan and the cyclic carnage between Shia and Sunni Muslims.

*

It was soon after my father’s death -- I was 50, he was 83 -- troubled by his stormy apostasy and anxious to jettison some of my own dismissive preconceptions that I ventured for the first time in the Kabbalah’s arcane realm. Enthralled and bewildered at first, often driven to mental exhaustion, I eventually tired of its multilayered circularity, contradictions and maddening esotericism. I was not being ushered into some liberating “beyond.” Rather, I was being shoved and jostled and inveigled to probe the “nothingness” that dwells within. I found such mental pirouettes more taxing than I’d imagined. Faced with the imponderable -- the very essence of Kabbalah -- I bowed out, humbled by the magnificence of paradox. All in all, my brief but intense foray into Kabbalah was not in vain. Careful, measured readings yielded fresh insights on the magnitude of the Mosaic ideal and the depth of Jewish thought. I would later marvel at the influence it would have on the works of Pico Della Mirandola, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, Emmanuel Swedenborg, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida. I would also discover that the root of Kabbalistic doctrine had been enunciated, much earlier and in considerably simpler language, in the Tao and other Buddhist teachings. No matter the originality of a concept -- “There is nothing new under the sun” (King Solomon; Ecclesiastes, 1.9) I must believe that I too was transformed, however imperceptibly, by the Kabbalah’s awesome and wrenching cerebral exactions.

When the distinction between material reality and mysticism become muddled, faith loses its mythical pretenses and one quickly dispenses with God.

*

Imagination is not inventive; it only perceives the latency of an eventuality.