“So, Bob, I’m now forty-seven cents away. Too much, heh?”
He gave me his John Wayne smile, which suited his face and lanky sixty-five-year-old frame.
I think we had stopped speaking a few months earlier after I had given him a few free bottles of reishi mushroom and he hadn’t even offered to buy me a beer. For Christ’s sake, when people couldn’t pay the county doctor in the American town of the distant past, they had given him a barrel of apples.
But I had saved him from sure death at the claws of cancer more than ten years before, and the bond was too sure to break over a temporary impasse. By taking him from the VA hospital up on the bluff overlooking the Golden Gate and putting him on thirty grams of vitamin C a day plus other vitamins and a diet and some herbs, I’d pulled him back from the diagnosis of lymphoma and going home to die, the best the doctors could offer.
“Bob, I went to a funeral last week for my friend Joel’s father. You want to hear about it? I almost called you to come. They didn’t have too many friends.”
He nodded, sipped on his beer, and settled back to listen. One thing about his generation and his culture, they were good listeners.
“Joel’s father, Murray, was eighty-two,” I began. “He survived Auschwitz, where the German bastards cut three fingers from his right hand with a saw, just for sport.”
I watched Bob’s face. It was as I expected, guarded. After all, I had met him in a bar about twelve years before, when I had stood up to his anti-Semitic ravings. We quickly became good but guarded pals, he needing his Jew and I my goy. Though he stood over six feet five inches and was made of lean English muscle, I had threatened to kill him if he didn’t shut up.
Now, I’m only five feet seven, but I’m broad enough and my eyes relay protons of dark danger. I’ve been mistaken for an Italian in Italy, a Spaniard in Spain, an Arab in Morocco, a Jew in Brooklyn. The reason I say I’ve been “mistaken” for a Jew is because I don’t behave like one, at least those I know here in America. Maybe I was born to lead a tank brigade in Israel or a mob in Vegas. All I know is that I’ve led Little League in the suburbs and a few expeditions to collect plants in the Fiji Islands and been damn proud of it. But my eyes are those of a saint when calm, a killer when agitated. It’s in my blood, I think, this murderous rage. Either through eye power or the work of saving angels, I’ve talked my way out of death more than once.
So Bob shut his mouth that night many years ago, and, as I’ve said, he tends to harbor certain Nazi sentiments. So when I told him about Murray’s mutilated hand, I wasn’t surprised at his lack of immediate pitying sounds. But I like a challenge, so I went on.
“Murray never cried about his hand,” I told Bob. “He came to America with Florence, who he met somewhere over there, and had a family, namely, Joel. He was full of life, this Murray. He was a big drinker, he loved women, he beat his son with a strap, but he was a big personality.”
Bob nodded.
I think the anti-Semite in him liked the “never cried” and “beat his son” parts of Murray. So I proceeded with my funeral story.
“I had lost touch with Joel for a few years. His wife threw him out for beating her and at least one of their daughters, and he was in one of his episodic ‘hidings,’ this time from the sheriff’s department. They were after him for his house and all his earnings to give to his greedy wife. Somehow, I heard his father, Murray, had cancer and was dying. I called his mother and went over a few days later.
“We brought a bag of groceries, you know, French bread, a pound of sliced turkey, some wine, some vegetables, and a quart of milk. The usual stuff you bring when someone’s sick, poor, and housebound. Florence and Joel greeted us at the door of their little one-bedroom apartment on Van Ness. I always liked it there, remembering the few Rosh Hashanah and Passover dinners they invited us to. Having been in the antiques business like my deceased father, Benny, the place was filled with oversized high-quality furniture and paintings. Murray was in a bathrobe in a gigantic English armchair, shrunken but beautiful in a way.
“He pulled me close and said, ‘Michael, I remember when you took me and Joel to Chabad in Berkeley almost twenty years ago. I know you almost twenty years. That’s not a short time. You took me to a bar after, on Telegraph. Those were the good times; now are the bad times.’
“Bob,” I prodded, “you hear this? I extend one good deed twenty years ago, and this guy remembers. It’s like one of the best moments of his life, this one good drink.
“So he goes fast into the hospital, where he insists they let him out, probably to die at home. And three or four days later, boom, it’s over.”
“Like that?”
“Joel told me he had been sick most of the night. Vomiting, probably those toxic chemo chemicals. He forces himself up and says, ‘Joel, she’s there. On your left, the angel of death.’ Joel gets scared. He says, ‘Pop, there’s nobody here but me and Mom.’ Murray stares at the big chair across the small room. ‘To your right, Joel. On the couch. He’s here with her.’ He stands up, starts to walk across the room, and collapses.”
I can see that even the anti-Semite Bob is tearing up, wiping the tears from his face. “Listen, you racist,” I said to him, “looking at that hole in the ground with Murray’s casket so bare and hearing the rabbi’s ancient chant and watching the young Mexican grave diggers moved by that chant, I became reminded of my own hole waiting.
“I never knew where I wanted to live,” I whispered to Joel’s friend from Israeli intelligence, “and I sure don’t know where I want to die.”
“We never know where we’re going to die,” he reminded me with a ’70s-rocker’s cackle and grin.
There is that scattereth, and yet increaseth;
And there is that withholdeth more than is meet, but it tendeth only to want.
—Proverbs 11:24
I the LORD search the heart,
I try the reins,
Even to give every man according to his ways,
According to the fruit of his doings.
—Jeremiah 17:10
The Savage Duality of Man: Animal Soul, Spiritual Soul
There is a war within each of us, due to the duality of the human soul. We are all both the transcendent spiritual man and the animal soul and we’re in constant conflict. Our two souls have visions that oppose each other, and that makes many people crack up and think they’re schizophrenic. And of course, most psychiatrists, God bless them, they’re smart people, but not religious people, by and large. So they get it all wrong. If a person comes to them and says, “Oh, Doctor, I have two feelings about it, two thoughts about everything,” their only answer is, “All right, here’s medication.”
In other words, “We’ll kill one of your thoughts, and then you’ll be a sane American.” Then you can wind up having sex in the middle of the day on a rug or on the bare floor. You can use sex, drugs, and rock and roll. You’ll be an ordinary American. In other words, a complete mess. But you won’t be divided anymore.
So what is this mystical thing I’m trying to tell you? Do all religions teach this? I don’t know about all religions. I don’t see it in Buddhism. I don’t think that Buddhists have ever been troubled by a duality of nature. I’ve read the Buddhist literature. It’s beautiful poetry, and it tries to steer people on the right course, the right path of life. It does it through poetry and writings.
But mystical Jews have looked into and understand the animal soul and the spiritual soul. Though many believe that the two souls are opponents and you must suppress the animal soul, that’s not what the teaching is. This is where Judaism differs from Christianity in its core philosophy. Judaism fundamentally differs from Christianity in that Judaism does not say to repress the animal soul. That’s why some people say Jews are earthy people. Christians I’ve known have said this.
What they don’t understand is that to achieve divinity, both souls, animal and spiritual, must equally spur this love for God. You must love your animal soul and turn it to the
work of God. When the Talmud says to “love the Lord your God with all your heart,” it means to love Him with both inclinations, both souls equally. It is our job or our challenge to transform the animal soul into an active partner in our divine service to God. The Talmud then explains how this transformation should occur.
When I talk about this subject on The Savage Nation, I can almost hear all the cynics in the audience saying, “Come on, cut the crap with the religion. I don’t want to hear it. Stick to what you do, Mike. Get back to the humor. Stick to your politics. I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe in the soul.” Okay, there’s a cynical part of me, too. That’s my animal soul. The cynical part of me that’s mocking my own words, that’s my animal soul mocking the godly side of me.
You can go crazy thinking about it all. I get it. I can hear my grandmother, the atheist, saying to me what she would say. My grandparents didn’t believe in God. They really didn’t. It’s funny, I came from a family of atheists in many ways. My mother was religious but not religious. She wasn’t religious, but she believed in God. She was afraid of God. I could see it in her eyes and in the things she did. She believed in God. She taught me about God. She had enough tragedy in her life to know that there had to be something more than life on this earth.
I think a lot of mental problems come from repression. The people who repress their thoughts or ideas most strongly become crazier. The more you try to repress what you’re feeling, the more disturbed you become and the more violent you can become. So what am I saying? Why not do it in the road? Maybe there’s a little truth to the hippie philosophy.
Watch where I’m going with this. I didn’t say, “have sex whenever you feel like it.” Here’s the whole trick: to recognize that you have lust; to recognize that you have lust, if that’s the issue for you. I’m giving you one example, sex, because that’s all that we think about in America, day and night, sex, sex, sex, sex. Every newspaper you read, the eye goes to the right column, to every moron on a yacht in the Caribbean doing an Instagram upside down. Big deal. How many times can those bimbos stretch themselves on a rented boat to show us their bikinis?
Get over it, already. We all have a body. We’ve seen it all before. There are no ideas there. They’re an example of the fallen man. It’s sad for all those girls. They’re like mental cases.
What I’m saying to you is don’t repress what you’re thinking and feeling. Accept what you’re thinking and feeling, but don’t act on it. I learned a long time ago that the trick is to recognize that you have those feelings but to refrain from acting on them. In one sentence, the difference between a sane person and an insane one is not what he thinks but what he does.
I had a caller on my radio show whose story was a perfect example of this. He told me that when he was a young college student, he didn’t have any morals, any sense of what was truly right or wrong. He went to college and was confused sexually, which he associated with the animal side of man’s nature. He ended up having a nervous breakdown and being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. But, he said, finding God helped him deal with his underlying problems. It saved him.
According to the core, mystical beliefs of the Jewish people, not to be confused with the populist notion of a Jewish person, as exemplified by Woody Allen, but the deeply religious souls out there, you must harness the animal soul, not repress it or kill it. You must turn the animal soul over to the very same force as that of the godly soul.
My caller had learned to do that. And once he did, he was freed, emotionally, spiritually, and even sociopolitically. His life completely straightened out. He got a job, went back to school, and got good grades. And now, when he feels conflicted or ready to freak out, he prays. He asks God for help and asks friends for help. Finding God and getting control of his animal side not only saved him but gave him the tools to save himself in the future if he starts to wander off track.
I’m going to give you the kung fu of the truly insightful religious Jewish people, the ones you never meet, the ones you never see or hear. They talk about the greatness of God every day and say a prayer every day. It’s called the Shema Yisrael, which means “God is one.” And they relate to the spiritual source in the animal soul in the blessings that precede this prayer. So all the prayers of the Jewish people are about trying to harness both animal and spiritual selves together in a worship of God.
This is the thing people don’t understand. What you see in religious people, whether they’re Jewish or Christian or others, is not that they’re pure because they think purely all the time. They have the same impulses that everybody has, but they don’t act on them. They unify those powers or energies.
Knowing that helped me thirty years ago when I thought I was going to crack. I learned that the greater the animal soul and the more trouble it’s causing you, the greater good you can do for the world. If you don’t kill the animal soul but instead harness it to the better side of yourself and put it to work for the better side of yourself, you can do great work.
Harnessing the animal soul is what the Bible means by, “He moved mountains.” It was from then on that I became what I am today. That is why I can speak to you every day on my radio show. As conflicted as I am, I can harness those forces and speak from Mount Sinai to my loyal audience on The Savage Nation.
And the dust returneth to the earth as it was,
And the spirit returneth unto God who gave it.
—Ecclesiastes 12:7
God Is Everywhere
God is not linear. God is infinite. Envision the Milky Way, all the stars and all the universes. All the pebbles, every grain of sand. All the crawling insects. God created all things, big and small. How we approach the Creator defines us.
Those who accept Jesus as the Son of God call themselves Christians. Those who bow to Allah are called Muslims. Jews worship the single entity they call God. What of Hindus, who worship not God but fantastic entities, and Buddhists, who read their poetry of life and bow down to an idol? What do we say of the many who worship the Great Spirit?
How do we define those who don’t believe in an all-powerful God but may spend their conscious minutes pondering the stars and planets, the movements of celestial bodies, the quarks and sparks of dying stars millions of light years away? Or those who argue over causality, the physicists and scientists who say there is no God except for rational thought and electrical impulses that die when our bodies no longer emit signs of life? Are they not seeking the answer to this ancient riddle?
As Joel’s friend said at the funeral, we never know where we’re going to die. And we certainly don’t know what comes next. In the meantime, we can look for the presence of God even here, amid all the ills of the world. In the end, the search to find God is the finding itself.
Acknowledgments
I want to thank my editor, Kate Hartson, for having the faith to publish this mysterious book. My agent, Ian Kleinert, for sticking with me during the white-water ride. Tom Mullen, for his excellent suggestions and organization of the biblical quotes. And those who so carefully worried over every comma.
About the Author
In 2016, after twenty-two years on the air, Michael Savage was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame, an honor he calls “the capstone of my life.”
The Savage Nation, the country’s number one streaming radio show, is one of the top programs in America, with millions of listeners and broadcast on more than 230 stations, including WABC and KSFO. A prolific New York Times best-selling author, Dr. Savage has been profiled in Playboy and The New Yorker, and he has been awarded the Freedom of Speech Award by Talkers magazine. He received his PhD in epidemiology and nutrition sciences from the University of California at Berkeley.
1 One week later, a fierce storm struck the island, washing that very room out to sea!
2 He was a wealthy man and wrote these words as a guide for his social equals.
3 “Ben Zoma’s four questions and answers, sublime in their simplicity, are among the most note
worthy gnomic sayings in religious literature” (unknown source).
4 Vodka was always an acceptable and welcome drink at dinners and certain rabbinical study sessions among this largely Russian Jewish group. I was unaware that a special vodka (kosher for Passover) was required.
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God, Faith, and Reason Page 15
