by W. E. Gutman
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 tel
l 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 re
ason. 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.