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"It is not in the heavens, that you should say, "Who among us can go up to the heavens and get it for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it?" (...) No, the thing is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to observe it". Deuteronomy
Listen, you heavens, and I will speak;
hear, you earth, the words of my mouth.
Let my teaching fall like rain
and my words descend like dew,
like showers on new grass,
like abundant rain on tender plants.
Hallelujah.
Praise the LORD from the heavens,
praise Him on the heights.
Praise Him, all His messengers,
praise Him, all His armies.
Praise Him, sun and moon,
praise Him, all you stars of light.
Praise Him, utmost heavens,
and the waters above the heavens.
Let them praise the LORD's name,
for He commanded, and they were created.
And He made them stand forever, for all time.
He set them a border that could not be crossed.
Praise the LORD from the earth,
sea monsters an all you deeps.
Fire and hail, snow and smoke,
stormwind that performs His command,
the mountains and all the hills,
fruit trees and all the cedars,
wild beasts and all the cattle,
crawling things and winged birds,
kings of earth and all the nations,
princes and all leaders of earth,
young men and also maidens,
elders together with lads.
Let them praise the LORD's name,
for His name alone is exalted.
His grandeur is over earth and the heavens.
And may He raise up a horn for His people,
praise of all His faithful,
of the Israelites, the people near Him.
Hallelujah.
Well I stepped into an avalanche, It covered up my soul; When I am not this hunchback that you see, I sleep beneath the golden hill. You who wish to conquer pain, You must learn, learn to serve me well.
You strike my side by accident As you go down for your gold. The cripple here that you clothe and feed Is neither starved nor cold; He does not ask for your company, Not at the centre, the centre of the world.
When I am on a pedestal, You did not raise me there. Your laws do not compel me To kneel grotesque and bare. I myself am the pedestal For this ugly hump at which you stare.
You who wish to conquer pain, You must learn what makes me kind; The crumbs of love that you offer me, They're the crumbs I've left behind. Your pain is no credential here, It's just the shadow, shadow of my wound.
I have begun to long for you, I who have no greed I have begun to ask for you, I who have no need. You say you've gone away from me, But I can feel you when you breathe.
Do not dress in those rags for me, I know you are not poor You don't love me quite so fiercely now When you know that you are not sure, It is your turn, beloved, It is your flesh that I wear.
Thousands
of Syrian asylum seekers have been stuck for weeks in Hungary,
prevented by security forces from boarding trains that would take them
to Germany, their final destination. The media has been showing horrible images of families with small children sleeping on the bare concrete outside the Budapest train station
— scenes that inevitably churned up memories of the last time thousands
of unwanted refugees were abused and shunted around Europe. Eventually Austrian and German volunteers drove to Budapest and
transported refugees to Germany in convoys of private cars. One of those
volunteers is an Austrian singer named Hans Breuer, who filled his van
with Syrian-Palestinian refugees. In this unforgettable video clip, Breur sings with them a famous old sentimental Yiddish lullaby, “Oyfn Veg Shteyt a Boym” (“A Tree at the Side of the Road“), and they join him in the wordless chorus (ay bitty bitty boym). It’s difficult to imagine a more historically complex scene than an
Austrian singing in Yiddish as he transports Palestinian refugees out of
a detention camp in Hungary to freedom in Germany.
A folding Shanah Tovah card from Israel, illustrated by Anne Neumann, Israel, early 1950s, Lion the Printer Co., Tel Aviv
14 de setembro de 2015
A message for Rosh Hashanah 5776 from Rabbi Sacks
“Original”
is not a word often used in connection with a code of Jewish law. In
general, the rule tends to be that if it’s true it isn’t new, and if
it’s new it isn’t true. But “original” is precisely the right word to
use in connection with Moses Maimonides’ law code the Mishneh Torah, especially in connection with Rosh Hashanah. Maimonides was the first halakhist to create a work called Hilkhot Teshuvah, the Laws of Repentance. One law in particular (3: 4) is stunning in its originality, as well as in its implications for us.
It begins with these words. “Even though the sounding of the shofar on
Rosh Hashanah is a scriptural decree, nonetheless it contains within it a
hint (as to its purpose), namely: Wake you sleepers from your sleep,
and you slumberers from your slumber, examine your deeds, return in
repentance and remember your Creator, you who forget the truth in the
follies of time and waste the whole year in vain pursuits that neither
profit nor save.”
What is original about this is that in the Talmud, the explanation given
for the shofar is that it reminds us and God of the ram offered in
place of his son by Abraham at the binding of Isaac. The sound of the
shofar itself, teruah, represents, according to the Talmud, the
sound of tears. In other words, as we stand before God in judgment we
ask Him to remember the sacrifices we and our ancestors made for His
sake. The shofar is our cry to God.
Maimonides says the opposite. The shofar is God’s cry to us. It is God’s
way of saying what he said to the first humans in the Garden of Eden:
“Where are you?” What have you done with the life, the freedom and the
blessings I gave you? This is a unique Maimonidean insight. What,
though, does he mean when he says, “you who forget the truth in the
follies of time and waste the whole year in vain pursuits that neither
profit nor save”?
This past year the brilliant New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote a national best seller, The Road to Character, in which he distinguishes between what he calls the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues.
The résumé virtues are the ones we write on our curriculum vitae, our
achievements, our qualifications, our skills. But it is the eulogy
virtues that are the ones for which we will be remembered. Are we kind,
honest, faithful? What are the ideals for which we live, and how do we
live them? These are not what we write on our résumé, but they make all
the difference to our quality of life and the impact we have on those
around us.
“We live," he writes, “in a society that encourages us to think about
how to have a great career, but leaves many of us inarticulate about how
to cultivate the inner life.” That is not a million miles from what the
Rambam meant when he spoke about wasting time on vain pursuits that
neither profit nor save: not that résumé virtues are unimportant, but
they are not all-important. The relentless pressure on us to succeed in
the commercial market-place gives us all too little time and
encouragement to develop the depths of character that make all the
difference to the quality of our relationships, our sense of a
meaningful life, and the love we give and receive. That, says the
Rambam, is what the shofar is calling us to.
What made David Brooks’ book especially fascinating is the way he
explains how he came to see the distinction between the two kinds of
virtue. He arrived at it, he says, after reading Rav Soloveitchik’s
great essay, The Lonely Man of Faith. Rav Soloveitchik noted
that the Torah contains two accounts of the creation of man, one in
Genesis 1, the other in Genesis 2. Genesis 1 is about humans as part of
the natural order, Homo sapiens, the biological species. Genesis 2 is
about individual people, Adam and Eve, capable of loneliness and love.
The reason the Torah does this, said the Rav, is because there are two
basic elements that make us what we are. There is Adam 1, “majestic
man,” the language-speaking, tool-making animal, highest of all life
forms, capable of monumental scientific and technological achievement.
But there is also Adam 2, the “covenantal” personality defined by our
relationships with other people and with God. Majestic man has the
résumé virtues, but Torah – the life of the covenant – is about the
eulogy virtues: humility, gratitude, integrity, joy, the willingness to
serve and make sacrifices in the name of high ideals. It is about
“charity, love and redemption.”
Even today, says Brooks, you know when you are in the presence of
someone who has the eulogy virtues. They “seem to possess an impressive
inner cohesion.” They are not leading “fragmented, scattershot lives.”
They are grounded, they have roots, they know what matters in the long
run, and they can tell the difference between the music and the noise.
The result is that they are not “blown off course by storms,” nor do
they “crumble in adversity.” They radiate, he says, “a sort of moral
joy.” They are not defeated by failure or wounded by criticism. They
have a massive internal strength and they make a real difference to
those whose lives they touch.
That defines the cheshbon ha-nafesh, the self-searching and
self-evaluation that should inform our thoughts on Rosh Hashanah, Yom
Kippur and the days between. That, according to Maimonides, is what the
shofar is calling us to. And that, surely, is a message for our time.
None of us, as individuals, can end global warming, bring peace to the
Middle East, or bring justice and compassion to the international arena.
But we can, quietly, develop the strengths of character that will make a
difference not only to our own lives but to those around us. That,
according to the Rambam (in his Eight Chapters) is what Judaism is about, the cultivation of character through the repeated acts we call mitzvot and the way of life we call halakhah.
That is where Judaism is so rich and transformative, and where
contemporary secular culture, with its focus on externalities and résumé
virtues, is often sadly lacking.
Let us try this coming year to develop, through our Jewish living, those
qualities of character that really are life-enhancing and that come
from a sense of the Shekhinah in our lives. The sages understood, none
more so than Maimonides, that the best way to change the world is by
changing ourselves. That is what the shofar is calling us to: to
cultivate the inner life so that, through humility, forgiveness and
love, we become vehicles through whom God’s blessings flow. Let us learn
to radiate moral joy.
Your housing conditions: the number
of the galaxy and of the star. The grave number.
Are you alone, or not.
What grasses grow above and where from
(e.g. from the stomach, eye, mouth, and so on).
You have the right to appeal.
In the blank space below specify how
long you have been awake and why
you were taken by surprise.
Howard Jacobson: rereading If This Is a Man by Primo Levi
Primo Levi's account of his incarceration in Auschwitz should not be
regarded as forbidding, argues Howard Jacobson. His subject may be
humanity in extremis, but it is still humanity
The
danger, as time goes by, is that we will tire of hearing about the
Holocaust, grow not only weary but disbelieving, and that out of fatigue
and ignorance more than cynicism, we will belittle and, by stages,
finally deny – actively or by default – the horror of the extermination
camps and the witness, by then so many fading memories, of those who
experienced them. The obligation to remember is inscribed on every
Holocaust memorial, but even the words "Never Forget" become irksome
eventually. Again and again Primo Levi's
work is described as indispensable, essential, necessary. None of those
terms overstate the case, but they do prepare readers new to Levi for a
forbiddingly educative experience, making him a writer unlike all
others, and the experience of reading him a chore. Which it isn't.
The friendlier language to which enthusiastic publishers and
reviewers sometimes have recourse is hardly more appropriate to the
case. It means nothing to say of any writer that he is "readable" or "a
page-turner", and Levi is certainly not one you read in a single sitting
without pausing for breath. There is much that makes one pause in If This is a Man,
the record of Levi's 11-month incarceration in Auschwitz, much one
cannot read without needing to lay aside the book and inhale the breath
of common air.
But while it would be foolish to describe him as an
entertainer, he nevertheless engages the reader's interest in a story
and an illumination, in character, in description, et cetera, as any
other imaginative writer does. His subject is humanity in extremis,
but it is still humanity. He does not stand outside the compendious
narrative of human life to which every writer is committed. Nor is he
the end of the line. Things happen in If This is a Man that are
beyond ordinary daily experience, but it is still us to whom they are
happening, and the understanding Levi seeks is no different in kind from
that sought by Shakespeare in King Lear, or Conrad in The Heart of Darkness.
So if we approach If This is a Man expecting a historical
investigation of the rise of Nazism and the potency of its appeal to the
German people, or an inquiry into the origins and nature of evil, we
ask both too much and too little of it. Levi is neither historian nor
metaphysician. As a matter of honour, no less than as a matter of
writerly decency – perhaps as a mark of respect to mankind – he refuses
grandiose philosophising or theology.
"We do not believe," he writes, "in the most obvious and facile
deduction: that man is fundamentally brutal, egoistic and stupid in his
conduct once every civilised institution is taken away … We believe,
rather, that the only conclusion to be drawn is that in the face of
driving necessity and physical disabilities many social habits and
instincts are reduced to silence."
The
quietness of that "conclusion", so determinedly rational and even
matter-of-fact, so calm in its rejection of the consolations of rage or
blame or despair, is characteristically heart-breaking. "Reduced to
silence" is a humane but terrible description of man's fate in the
camps; it is inevitable, final, an attrition of spirit of which the
beatings and the humiliations are just the foretaste, and which can only
be atoned for, all round, by the opposite to silence. This is what the
book is for. It must speak of what happened, of what it knows, for the
very reason that silence – the removal of the will and wherewithal to
speak, and the fear of never being listened to or believed – was the
ultimate aim of that system of dehumanisation Nazism embraced, and the
proof it had succeeded.
The subject of If This is a Man is not how could men do such
things, but what was it that they did, how did it fall to some
prisoners ("the saved") to endure it and others ("the drowned") not to,
what is left when everything but the barest capacity to endure, the
power only "to refuse our consent", is driven out, and by what means are
some still able to impress on others the suggestion of a world "not
corrupt, not savage, extraneous to hatred and terror … a remote
possibility of good".
From the first pages of the book, the essential project of the camps
is laid bare: it is, in Levi's words, "the demolition of a man". Through
small and large acts of deprivation and destruction we follow the
process: the removal of hope, of dignity, of luxury, of necessity, of
self; the reduction of a man to a hoarder of grey slabs of bread and the
scrapings of a soup bowl (wonderfully told all this, with a novelist's
gift for detail and sometimes very nearly comic surprise), to the
confinement of a narrow bed – in which there is "not even any room to be
afraid" – with a stranger who doesn't speak your language, to the cruel
illogicality of hating a fellow victim of oppression more than you hate
the oppressor himself – one torment following another, and even the
bleak comfort of thinking you might have touched rock bottom denied you
as, when the most immediate cause of a particular stress comes to an
end, "you are grievously amazed to see that another one lies behind; and
in reality a whole series of others".
With
grievous amazement, never self-pitying but sometimes bordering on a
sort of numbed wonderment, Levi records the day-to-day personal and
social history of the camp, noting not only the fine gradations of his
own descent, but the capacity of some prisoners to cut a deal and strike
a bargain, while others, destined by their age or character for the gas
ovens, follow "the slope down to the bottom, like streams that run down
to the sea".
There are pages where, unexpectedly, amid the horror, a reader feels
he has stumbled on a near-inconsequential diary entry. "It is lucky that
it is not windy today," one such passage begins. The incongruity of
anything being lucky in such a place strikes the diarist: "Strange, how
in some way one always has the impression of being fortunate, how some
chance happening, perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold
of despair and allows us to live." In this way, too, we come to
understand how living is possible, how, if it is the small things that
demean, it can also be the small things that sustain. Here, perhaps, is
the advantage of Levi having written If This is a Man so close
to his time in Auschwitz. Recollection has not been worn away by years
and controversy nor subsumed under the necessity to take a long view of
historical events. In much of this book, immediacy does the work of
theorising and education.
The anger, also, is too close to the event to feel either tempered or
cranked up. Seeing old Kuhn, a religious man, praying aloud and
thanking God he has been spared selection for the gas chamber, Levi is
furious that Kuhn does not realise it will be his turn next, that "what
has happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory power, no
pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of
man can ever clean again … If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn's
prayer."
It is a bitterly ironic thought, God spitting at a devotee's prayers,
as though in such a place, where such crimes have been committed, it is
a blasphemy to be religious. A blasphemy, too, even to think of pardon
or expiation.
Levi gave his life to considering the full extent of those crimes,
for they did not stop at the gates of the camps. They would go on, if
the guilty had their way, into the dreams of men like him, mocking them
with the promise that they would never be listened to, and even where
they did secure a hearing, would never be believed.
In a terrible dream, which he discovers he shares with fellow
inmates, Levi is back home telling people of his experiences, but they
are "completely indifferent … speak confusedly of other things among
themselves, as if I was not there". Here is the dread to end dreads –
"the ever-repeated scene of the unlistened-to story."
And so, of course, in many quarters it has turned out to be. Despite a
testament as harrowing as his, and for all its meticulous refusal of
melodrama, the Holocaust has become subject to sneering scepticism – now
outright denial, now the slower drip of devaluation and diminishment.
In later books, as he saw the thing he dreaded becoming a reality, Levi
wrote of the "negators of truth", people who defame not only those who
lived to tell the tale, but those for whom they speak as though "by
proxy", the true witnesses of the abomination – that is to say, those
who did not survive it and so cannot speak for themselves. Thus, in any
of its forms, Holocaust denial kills the victims a second time.
Strong though the words of If This is a Man are, they are still weak before the will to deny or forget.
An Australian sheep, named Chris by his rescuers, is photographed before being shorn of over 40 kilograms of wool after being found near Australia's capital city Canberra
"Love the stranger because you were once strangers" calls on us now
You
would have to be less than human not to be moved by images we have seen
of the refugee crisis threatening to overwhelm Europe: the desperate
scenes at the station in Budapest, the seventy one bodies found in the
abandoned lorry in Austria, the two hundred people drowned when their
boat capsized off the coast in Libya, and most heartbreaking of all, the
body of three year old Aylan Kurdi, lifeless on a Turkish shore: an
image that will linger long in the mind as a symbol of a world gone mad.
This is the greatest humanitarian challenge faced by Europe in many
decades. Angela Merkel was not wrong when she said, “If Europe fails on
the question of refugees, its close connection with universal civil
rights will be destroyed.”
The influx of refugees overwhelming parts of Europe is a massive crisis,
but it is at just such times that it is worth remembering that the
Chinese ideogram for ‘crisis’ also means ‘opportunity.’ Now is a unique
opportunity to show that the ideals for which the European Union and
other international bodies such as the United Nations were formed are
still compelling, compassionate and humane.
Many of the conventions and protocols establishing legal rights for
refugees emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War, as did the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights itself. One of the dark moments in
that history occurred in July 1938, when representatives of thirty two
countries gathered in the French spa town of Evian to discuss the
humanitarian disaster that everyone knew was about to overtake the Jews
of Europe wherever Hitler’s Germany held sway. Jews were desperate to
leave. They knew their lives were at risk and so did the politicians and
aid agencies at the conference. Yet country after country shut its
doors. Nation after nation in effect said, it wasn’t their problem.
At such times even small humanitarian gestures can pierce the darkness
and light a flame of hope. That is what happened in Kindertransport, the
initiative spearheaded, among others, by the late Sir Nicholas Winton
that rescued ten thousand Jewish children from Nazi Germany. Half a
century later I came to know many of those who had been rescued. They
loved Britain and sought richly to contribute to it. I and many other
Jews of my generation grew up with that love, knowing that without
Britain’s willingness to provide our parents and grandparents with
refuge, they would have died and we would not have been born. As long as
human history is told, these acts of humanitarianism will stand as a
triumph of the spirit over political expediency and moral indifference.
Sixty years after Kindertransport a gathering took place in London of
more than a thousand of those who had been rescued. It was a highly
emotional day as one after another told their stories. But the speech
that had us all in tears was not from one of the rescued children but
from the late Lord Attenborough, whose family were among the rescuers.
He spoke of how his parents summoned their three boys and told them they
wanted to adopt two young Jewish girls from Germany, Helga and Irene.
They explained the sacrifices they would all have to make. They would
now be a family of seven rather than five, which meant that they would
have to share more widely, and that, they said, included their love,
because “You have us, but they have nobody.” The boys agreed, and the
two girls became part of their family. As he told this story, Lord
Attenborough wept, and said that was the most important day of his life.
Suddenly we realized that it is the sacrifices we make for the sake of
high ideals that make us great, and that applies to nations as well as
individuals.
Even in the best-case scenario, Europe alone cannot solve the problems
of which the refugees are the victims. The conflicts that have brought
chaos to the Middle East continue to defy any obvious solution. Every
option that has been tried has seemed to fail: military intervention in
Afghanistan and Iraq, no-fly zones in Libya, and non-intervention in
Syria. None has put out the smoldering fires of unrest, religious and
ethnic discord and civil war. It is all too easy to say, this is not our
problem, and besides, it is happening a long way away.
Yet nothing in our interconnected world is a long way away. Everything
that could go global does go global, from terror to religious extremism
to websites preaching paranoia and hate. Never before have John Donne’s
words rung more true: “Any man's death diminishes me, because I am
involved in mankind.” Therefore, “never send to know for whom the bell
tolls; It tolls for thee.”
A strong humanitarian response on the part of Europe and the
international community could achieve what military intervention and
political negotiation have thus far failed to achieve. They would
constitute the clearest possible evidence that the European experience
of two World Wars and the Holocaust have taught that free societies,
where people of all faiths and ethnicities make space for one another,
are the only way to honour our shared humanity, whether we conceive that
humanity in secular or religious terms. Fail this and we will have
failed one of the fundamental tests of humanity.
I used to think that the most important line in the Bible was, “Love
your neighbour as yourself.” Then I realised that it is easy to love
your neighbour because he or she is usually quite like yourself. What is
hard is to love the stranger, one whose colour, culture or creed is
different from yours. That is why the command, “Love the stranger
because you were once strangers,” resonates so often throughout the
Bible.
It is summoning us now. A bold act of collective generosity will show
that the world, particularly Europe, really has learned the lesson of
its own dark past and is willing to take a global lead in building a
more hopeful future. Wars that cannot be won by weapons can sometimes be
won by the sheer power of acts of humanitarian generosity to inspire
the young to choose the way of peace instead of holy war.
Bantam cools down after an early morning gallop at the Moonee Valley Racecourse in Melbourne, Australia
I found that Wisdom is superior to folly
As light is superior to darkness;
A wise man has his eyes in his head,
Whereas a fool walks in darkness.
But I also realized that the same fate awaits them both. So I reflected: "The fate of the fool is also destined for me; to what advantage, then, have I been wise?" And I came to the conclusion that that too was futile, because the wise man, just like the fool, is not remembered forever; for, as the succeeding days roll by, both are forgotten. Alas, the wise man dies, just like the fool!
And so I loathed life. For I was distressed by all that goes under the sun, because everything is futile and pursuit of wind.
"The Great Pyramid and the Pyramid of Khafre", Giza, Francis Bedford (1862)
The Roll Call
He stands, stamps a little in his boots,
rubs his hands. He’s cold in the morning breeze:
a diligent angel, who has worked hard for his promotions.
Suddenly he thinks he’s made a mistake: all eyes,
he counts again in the open notebook
all the bodies waiting for him in the square,
camp within camp: only I
am not there, am not there, am a mistake,
turn off my eyes, quickly, erase my shadow.
I shall not want. The sum will be in order
without me: here for eternity.
Tricoloured heron fishing, using wings to create shade
1 de setembro de 2015
Oliver Sacks: Sabbath
Credit
Aidan Koch
MY
mother and her 17 brothers and sisters had an Orthodox upbringing — all
photographs of their father show him wearing a yarmulke, and I was told
that he woke up if it fell off during the night. My father, too, came
from an Orthodox background. Both my parents were very conscious of the
Fourth Commandment (“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy”), and
the Sabbath (Shabbos, as we called it in our Litvak way) was entirely
different from the rest of the week. No work was allowed, no driving, no
use of the telephone; it was forbidden to switch on a light or a stove.
Being physicians, my parents made exceptions. They could not take the
phone off the hook or completely avoid driving; they had to be
available, if necessary, to see patients, or operate, or deliver babies.
We
lived in a fairly Orthodox Jewish community in Cricklewood, in
Northwest London — the butcher, the baker, the grocer, the greengrocer,
the fishmonger, all closed their shops in good time for the Shabbos, and
did not open their shutters till Sunday morning. All of them, and all
our neighbors, we imagined, were celebrating Shabbos in much the same
fashion as we did.
Around
midday on Friday, my mother doffed her surgical identity and attire and
devoted herself to making gefilte fish and other delicacies for
Shabbos. Just before evening fell, she would light the ritual candles,
cupping their flames with her hands, and murmuring a prayer. We would
all put on clean, fresh Shabbos clothes, and gather for the first meal
of the Sabbath, the evening meal. My father would lift his silver wine
cup and chant the blessings and the Kiddush, and after the meal, he
would lead us all in chanting the grace.
On
Saturday mornings, my three brothers and I trailed our parents to
Cricklewood Synagogue on Walm Lane, a huge shul built in the 1930s to
accommodate part of the exodus of Jews from the East End to Cricklewood
at that time. The shul was always full during my boyhood, and we all had
our assigned seats, the men downstairs, the women — my mother, various
aunts and cousins — upstairs; as a little boy, I sometimes waved to them
during the service. Though I could not understand the Hebrew in the
prayer book, I loved its sound and especially hearing the old medieval
prayers sung, led by our wonderfully musical hazan.
All
of us met and mingled outside the synagogue after the service — and we
would usually walk to the house of my Auntie Florrie and her three
children to say a Kiddush, accompanied by sweet red wine and honey
cakes, just enough to stimulate our appetites for lunch. After a cold
lunch at home — gefilte fish, poached salmon, beetroot jelly — Saturday
afternoons, if not interrupted by emergency medical calls for my
parents, would be devoted to family visits. Uncles and aunts and cousins
would visit us for tea, or we them; we all lived within walking
distance of one another.
The
Second World War decimated our Jewish community in Cricklewood, and the
Jewish community in England as a whole was to lose thousands of people
in the postwar years. Many Jews, including cousins of mine, emigrated to
Israel; others went to Australia, Canada or the States; my eldest
brother, Marcus, went to Australia in 1950. Many of those who stayed
assimilated and adopted diluted, attenuated forms of Judaism. Our
synagogue, which would be packed to capacity when I was a child, grew
emptier by the year.
I
chanted my bar mitzvah portion in 1946 to a relatively full synagogue,
including several dozen of my relatives, but this, for me, was the end
of formal Jewish practice. I did not embrace the ritual duties of a
Jewish adult — praying every day, putting on tefillin before prayer each
weekday morning — and I gradually became more indifferent to the
beliefs and habits of my parents, though there was no particular point
of rupture until I was 18. It was then that my father, inquiring into my
sexual feelings, compelled me to admit that I liked boys.
“I haven’t done anything,” I said, “it’s just a feeling — but don’t tell Ma, she won’t be able to take it.”
He did
tell her, and the next morning she came down with a look of horror on
her face, and shrieked at me: “You are an abomination. I wish you had
never been born.” (She was no doubt thinking of the verse in Leviticus
that read, “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman,
both of them have committed an abomination: They shall surely be put to
death; their blood shall be upon them.”)
The matter was never mentioned again, but her harsh words made me hate religion’s capacity for bigotry and cruelty.
After
I qualified as a doctor in 1960, I removed myself abruptly from England
and what family and community I had there, and went to the New World,
where I knew nobody. When I moved to Los Angeles, I found a sort of
community among the weight lifters on Muscle Beach, and with my fellow
neurology residents at U.C.L.A., but I craved some deeper connection —
“meaning” — in my life, and it was the absence of this, I think, that
drew me into near-suicidal addiction to amphetamines in the 1960s.
Recovery
started, slowly, as I found meaningful work in New York, in a chronic
care hospital in the Bronx (the “Mount Carmel” I wrote about in
“Awakenings”). I was fascinated by my patients there, cared for them
deeply, and felt something of a mission to tell their stories — stories
of situations virtually unknown, almost unimaginable, to the general
public and, indeed, to many of my colleagues. I had discovered my
vocation, and this I pursued doggedly, single-mindedly, with little
encouragement from my colleagues. Almost unconsciously, I became a
storyteller at a time when medical narrative was almost extinct. This
did not dissuade me, for I felt my roots lay in the great neurological
case histories of the 19th century (and I was encouraged here by the
great Russian neuropsychologist A. R. Luria). It was a lonely but deeply
satisfying, almost monkish existence that I was to lead for many years.
During
the 1990s, I came to know a cousin and contemporary of mine, Robert
John Aumann, a man of remarkable appearance with his robust, athletic
build and long white beard that made him, even at 60, look like an
ancient sage. He is a man of great intellectual power but also of great
human warmth and tenderness, and deep religious commitment —
“commitment,” indeed, is one of his favorite words. Although, in his
work, he stands for rationality in economics and human affairs, there is
no conflict for him between reason and faith.
He
insisted I have a mezuza on my door, and brought me one from Israel. “I
know you don’t believe,” he said, “but you should have one anyhow.” I
didn’t argue.
In
a remarkable 2004 interview, Robert John spoke of his lifelong work in
mathematics and game theory, but also of his family — how he would go
skiing and mountaineering with some of his nearly 30 children and
grandchildren (a kosher cook, carrying saucepans, would accompany them),
and the importance of the Sabbath to him.
“The
observance of the Sabbath is extremely beautiful,” he said, “and is
impossible without being religious. It is not even a question of
improving society — it is about improving one’s own quality of life.”
In
December of 2005, Robert John received a Nobel Prize for his 50 years
of fundamental work in economics. He was not entirely an easy guest for
the Nobel Committee, for he went to Stockholm with his family, including
many of those children and grandchildren, and all had to have special
kosher plates, utensils and food, and special formal clothes, with no
biblically forbidden admixture of wool and linen.
THAT
same month, I was found to have cancer in one eye, and while I was in
the hospital for treatment the following month, Robert John visited. He
was full of entertaining stories about the Nobel Prize and the ceremony
in Stockholm, but made a point of saying that, had he been compelled to
travel to Stockholm on a Saturday, he would have refused the prize. His
commitment to the Sabbath, its utter peacefulness and remoteness from
worldly concerns, would have trumped even a Nobel.
In
1955, as a 22-year-old, I went to Israel for several months to work on a
kibbutz, and though I enjoyed it, I decided not to go again. Even
though so many of my cousins had moved there, the politics of the Middle
East disturbed me, and I suspected I would be out of place in a deeply
religious society. But in the spring of 2014, hearing that my cousin
Marjorie — a physician who had been a protégée of my mother’s and had
worked in the field of medicine till the age of 98 — was nearing death, I
phoned her in Jerusalem to say farewell. Her voice was unexpectedly
strong and resonant, with an accent very much like my mother’s. “I don’t
intend to die now,” she said, “I will be having my 100th birthday on
June 18th. Will you come?”
I
said, “Yes, of course!” When I hung up, I realized that in a few
seconds I had reversed a decision of almost 60 years. It was purely a
family visit. I celebrated Marjorie’s 100th with her and extended
family. I saw two other cousins dear to me in my London days,
innumerable second and removed cousins, and, of course, Robert John. I
felt embraced by my family in a way I had not known since childhood.
I
had felt a little fearful visiting my Orthodox family with my lover,
Billy — my mother’s words still echoed in my mind — but Billy, too, was
warmly received. How profoundly attitudes had changed, even among the
Orthodox, was made clear by Robert John when he invited Billy and me to
join him and his family at their opening Sabbath meal.
The
peace of the Sabbath, of a stopped world, a time outside time, was
palpable, infused everything, and I found myself drenched with a
wistfulness, something akin to nostalgia, wondering what if: What if A and B and C had been different? What sort of person might I have been? What sort of a life might I have lived?
In
December 2014, I completed my memoir, “On the Move,” and gave the
manuscript to my publisher, not dreaming that days later I would learn I
had metastatic cancer, coming from the melanoma I had in my eye nine
years earlier. I am glad I was able to complete my memoir without
knowing this, and that I had been able, for the first time in my life,
to make a full and frank declaration of my sexuality, facing the world
openly, with no more guilty secrets locked up inside me.
In
February, I felt I had to be equally open about my cancer — and facing
death. I was, in fact, in the hospital when my essay on this, “My Own
Life,” was published in this newspaper. In July I wrote another piece
for the paper, “My Periodic Table,” in which the physical cosmos, and
the elements I loved, took on lives of their own.
And
now, weak, short of breath, my once-firm muscles melted away by cancer,
I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual,
but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life — achieving a
sense of peace within oneself. I find my thoughts drifting to the
Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the
seventh day of one’s life as well, when one can feel that one’s work is
done, and one may, in good conscience, rest.
