“Why do you insist on making enemies,” my father asked as we sat down to a game of chess. “Have you learned nothing from the hostility, and chagrin your views and pronouncements have caused?”
My father never indulged in idle criticism. His was an irrefutable statement of fact, one that echoed the inner struggles that marked his life. Born and raised in near-poverty by loving but simple, unschooled and unmotivated parents, he quickly concluded that an education was his passport to freedom, physical and intellectual. Ironically, an education delivered him into another form of slavery, one that would call for an even greater degree of devotion and compliance 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 a brilliant astronomer, tailor or blacksmith if that’s what he had aimed to be. An unwavering sense of duty would have imparted 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; forged the finest horseshoes until exhaustion had weakened his grip. But I know of no occupation that would have given him lasting satisfaction, let alone happiness. Medicine did not. The career that was to free him from the bonds of destitution would become a burden that he valiantly and scrupulously endured all of his life while lamenting the frailty and imperfection of the human body and deploring the maddening inexactitude of medical science. The emotional toll daily issues of life and death claimed on a restless man convinced of the futility of existence was incalculable.
“Humanity is an absurd happenstance and a calamity,” he said in a rare moment of unguarded melancholy. “If Sisyphus weren't so busy rolling his rock up the hill he'd be laughing his head off at us. But he is us.”
A lifetime of empathy toward others, repaid with indifference or unkindness, had found him exhausted, depleted. Caring too deeply, he had 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 one of his distant cousins, a noted prize-winning writer, my father never waxed mystical about his roots. He derived neither strength nor pride from them. Grief-stricken at the loss of his parents and siblings, stunned by the sheer barbarity of the Holocaust, he first toyed with the idea that Jews had been predestined to martyrdom. He quickly rejected that notion and concluded that suffering is universal and indiscriminate, and that it 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 and lacking the visceral transcendentalism, the truculence that accompanied the clan’s faith.
“An ant doesn’t wonder why it isn’t a butterfly. I didn’t ask myself 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 have created. My whole is larger than the sum total of my hereditary parts.”
It was this repudiation of an irreversible 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 throughout his life. Like his father before him, he had spent countless hours “meandering in stupefied fascination” along its cerebral minefields. At first, he had felt intellectually kindled but the leaps of comprehension, not to mention the leaps of faith the Kabbalah demands, had left him exhausted and confused. Ultimately, it was the Kabbalah’s hyper-deterministic character that prompted my father to dismiss this, the most arcane of all Jewish philosophical 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 leads to disillusionment.
“A real man does not submit meekly to his maker’s caprices. A real man takes risks. He challenges the very odds that are stacked against him.” In this bitter advice 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 misty realm, and an admonition to his only son -- me -- to stand tall and yield to no one.
Late in life, overwhelmed by old age, which he described as “a heavy garment,” 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 God, describing “it” as “blinkered, ethnocentric and self-absorbed.” He would continue to read the Bible, however, until the end of his life. Far from seeking comfort, he was looking to topple hallowed heroes and challenge cherished convictions by pointing to the contradictions, the lies, the betrayals, the greed, the violence, the cruelty, the depravity, the bestial godlessness of man, the insufferable inhumanity of God. Concluding 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, drawing instant and furious wrath from friends, colleagues and family.
Accused of heresy, 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 few days before he left Yesod for Ein Sof, 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. It must be done in private, in a tête-à-tête with one’s own conscience, away from partisan influences and purged of all acquired preconceptions.”
The truth he had 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 with 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 notion that he may have been at odds with the world, as I am, but at peace with himself.
*
“Enemies are not made, Dad. You should know this better than anyone. Didn’t you once exhort me to fight for what I believe? Enemies lie dormant, like a wicked virus ready to invade a vulnerable host. They exist, like nettles and poison oak and scorpions and asps. They thrive and proliferate like dandelions and crab grass. Favorable winds -- hatred, envy, greed, contempt, ignorance -- carry their seeds to the four corners. The odium with which my enemies are filled is a reflection of their personalities. A snake produces venom whether it intends to strike at a prey or not. ‘Just in case’ is the motto of the human predator.”
My father sighed. “You’re right but logic and reason, however clearly and rationally expounded, can’t bring back 20/20 vision to those who suffer from self-inflicted myopia. You can’t change reality, let alone alter the reality that others choose to acknowledge or ignore. Not here. Not in Ein Sof. What you see, what you hear, what you experience, tangibly and abstractly, is immovable, final.”
As he spoke, I could hear, drifting from the communal room in waves of cadenced strains, the otherworldly harmonies of Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain. I closed my eyes. Childhood memories of Disney’s Fantasia glided past me like falling leaves swept by an autumn gust. The Angelus bell rang in the distance. The first rays of dawn drove vixens and warlocks back to their dens and the gauzy spirits of the dead floated back to their graves for yet another day of rest.