by W. E. Gutman
“It’s not that simple,” Yossi retorted, attempting an assuaging smile. Tradition....”
I resisted the temptation to cry out, “Fuck tradition.”
“Consider my past,” I pleaded instead. Rewind my life. Dissect my leanings and idiosyncrasies. Reread, out loud, the words I uttered, the tracts I published. Ponder the consternation they caused. Are you forgetting that I was a source of shame to many of you back in Yesod? Didn’t one of you suggest, as I reported on the gory deeds of Central American death squads, that I was meddling in other people’s affairs?”
Meema squirmed. She pinched her razor-thin lips and they disappeared in a grimace of contempt.
“Didn’t another among you call me an agent provocateur because I spoke out against military adventurism and torture?”
Yanosh fidgeted with his grapes.
“And didn’t you, Yossi, once complain to my father that my inquests into government corruption, the bestiality of man and the nauseating sanctimony of the Jerusalem rabbis amount to treason?”
Yossi blinked.
“And when I reached fifty -- not quite old enough to lay down my weapons -- didn’t my favorite uncle ask, ‘Aren’t you a bit too old to play paladins?’ Troubled by my forays into the belly of the beast where I hunted down vampires, hadn’t he added with a hint of irony in his voice, ‘don’t you think you should let younger men carry the torch for a change?’ And didn’t I reply that age alone couldn’t stop me from dissecting the horrors I witnessed, to expose pretense and duplicity and sleaze in high places?”
Uncle Johnny, my maternal uncle who, spellbound, had listened to my appeal now evaded my gaze. A well-to-do criminal lawyer who had specialized in defending men he knew deserved to be hanged from the highest tree, had once urged me to pursue a legal career. My fiery high school compositions, precocious gifts of effrontery and rhetorical acrobatics had so impressed him that he secretly lobbied my parents to send me to law school. But Uncle Johnny’s courtroom theatrics, the flourish of his body language, the ostentation of his blackjack arguments against often blameless plaintiffs, his very assertion that the worst scoundrel ever to walk the earth is entitled to due process had seemed incongruous at the time and given me all the ammunition I needed to dismiss his counsel and reject his profession. Years later he had amiably scolded me and claimed that mine was perhaps the only “important case” he’d ever lost.
I remember asking, “What sort of victory would you have wrested had I ignored my instincts, betrayed my conscience and yielded to pressure?” He smiled with avuncular pride and shook his head.
“Like I said. You’d have made one helluva trial lawyer.”
*
I shut my eyes for a moment, reliving the sterling epoch that had once been mine. I had created a persona from a large collection of fictional characters and re-invented myself over the years: Part activist, part rabble-rouser, a nonconformist filled with compassion for the voiceless and the persecuted, the orphan and the widow’s son, an anarchist revolted by bigotry and injustice, and, at the same time, a misanthrope overflowing with revulsion for the human race. It was a dichotomy I could neither explain nor reconcile. On one hand, I needed to find and expose the tiniest of stains in the purest driven snow. On the other, the pleasure I derived from such commerce far exceeded any possible urge to inform. I treated fact as a prop. It was the mood, the emotions, the color my stories conveyed, the anxiety or the outrage they were apt to elicit, that made me reach for a pen, not reverence for the Fourth Estate, nor a fondness for the reader whose fawning esteem or scathing attacks I ignored at first. My aim was to cause anxiety and discomfiture, to remind the forgetful and the smug that the Emperor is naked, to keep the son of a bitch stripped long enough for all to see him bare-assed and trembling, to sting and confound men blinded by their own self-induced myopia.
“How else do you awaken a dormant conscience...” I once fired back at an editor enraged by my denunciation of a cardinal who cavorted with barrel-chested colonels and generals and their buxom mistresses, yet turned his back on the gruesome human rights abuses that took place under his holy dominion, “... but by prying eyes open and dousing them with acid? If man does not peer into the heart of darkness,” I pleaded, “will God?” The editor tore up my essay. This would not be the last affirmation that “freedom of the press” extends up to but not beyond the editor’s desk and those who own the presses.
Hadn’t I asked in an editorial timed to appear on the Day of Atonement, “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 huddled masses that call on him and seek his succor? What cruel despot decrees that his subjects will speak and live by words not their own, that they will blindly obey the injunctions of his self-anointed envoys, tremble at their threats, mouth off supplications and jeremiads and recite guilt-ridden prayers of indebtedness and adoration, 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?”
I paid dearly for indulging my vice. I was fired, lost friends and suffered the disaffection of family. I was shunned, isolated, censured, even threatened. But I never kicked the habit and remained habituated, less for the fleeting high it produced than out of respect for all the unpopular causes I’d championed, some out of conviction, a few out of spite for those who did not share my egalitarian views, most in tribute to George Orwell’s definition of freedom: “the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear.”
I’d also become fearful of losing the modest acclaim I had worked so hard to secure. Although it proved unlikely that my tracts could radically influence public opinion, I had by now a reputation to maintain and I could not afford to surrender the modest momentum I had gained. I was getting published. My byline, set in bold face, appeared under a cameo likeness of me. I had an audience and fresh enemies to rankle and strike back at. Safeguarding such ego-boosting assets would exact an effort all out of proportion with the ephemeral pleasure they produced. Instead of catering to my craft, I was now busy feeding an insatiable momentum of self-perpetuation-by-retaliation. No sooner had my broadsides created the desired effect -- shock, indignation or sheer horror at the medley of human miseries I chronicled -- than I’d fire off another salvo. Eventually, what had been a youthful fantasy, a Faustian pact, would shackle a once happy dilettante to a tiresome reflex. I kept going just to see how far it would get me. I never stopped.
In time, while I eagerly joined in the intellectual skirmishes of the day, my polemics evolved from tactical weapon into strategic objective: Excavate the truth, no matter what it takes to dredge from the mire where it hides or is often buried. I had become a saboteur and an apologist for the devil in whose company I learned at long last to shed what Maimonides called “senseless beliefs and degenerate customs” and to embrace the truth, lofty and hideous, enlightening and damning.
I was in my mid-fifties and involuntarily “retired” (anyone deemed “overqualified” understands the sting of forced joblessness) when I decided to turn an informal journal into a memoir, a life story replete with escapades, heartbreaks and disaster, in whose pages I could comment on the world as I saw it, immune from the editor’s blue pencil or the ever-present threat of censorship. Satirical, politically incorrect in the extreme, devoid of simplistic rationalizations, what I compiled in more than five years of writing and rewriting grew into an accolade to gonzo journalism, a tribute to my parents, a personal testament of self-scrutiny devoid of pedantry or false modesty, and an indictment of every stinking manifestation of man’s sadism, greed, gullibility and, most of all, stupidity, which I de
fine as “the passion for fixed ideas.”
No, this was not a burst of male menopausal narcissism, exhibitionism, catharsis or the vainglorious hope of a literary ticket to posterity. I was driven by a compelling need to tell all, often with brutal bluntness and self deprecation, to relate a personal story that spans four continents and seven decades, and to do so in brushstrokes that deliver an unvarnished canvas of the people, places and events -- reality stripped naked -- that marked my life. I minced no words. I spared no sensibilities. I took no prisoners.
My greatest victory, I believe, had been one of self-conquest. I reached emotional and spiritual independence by shedding absurd beliefs, relying on my inner reserves of intellectual power, banning the past from memory, living in the present with an eye sharply peeled toward the future, and ignoring situations or events over which I had no control. This might not be a “Dale Carnegie” story of success or a Horatio Alger rags-to-riches saga. I amassed no fortune, didn't become an industry mogul, a tycoon. I moved no mountains, nor did I ever aspire to do so. If we measure success in terms of wealth and material assets, I'm a miserable failure. If it means satisfaction with one's own achievements, peace of mind, the ability to accept one's limitations and the chutzpah to believe in one's elusive potential, then I've reached the pinnacle of success, all that without benefit of motivational gurus who enrich themselves by exploiting the greed and credulity of their audiences. Last, I was a struggling agnostic for most of my life. I had since come out of the closet and breathed the oxygenated air of emancipation by proclaiming my Atheism.
*
I looked at Yossi and studied the eagerness in the eyes of those assembled around him. I saw not a glimmer of fondness for me, or joy or festive anticipation. Instead, what their expressions conveyed was the lurid zeal of fanatics bent on solemnizing, by their presence, the sacramental reenactment of their faith and most fervid convictions. It’s an expression I’d witnessed at ritual circumcisions, Bar-Mitzvahs, Eucharistic rites, baptisms, communions, prayer vigils, tribal scarifications, evangelical revivals and exorcisms, in the eyes of hopeless cripples in Lourdes, in the trancelike rocking of rapt Orthodox Jews praying at the Western Wall, in the serene stupor of Hindu mystics and in the awestruck faces of children being read a fairy tale. I sensed neither sympathy nor a grasp of the existential dilemma they were forcing me to face. The clan’s expectations were as unrealistic as they were unjust. How do you honor tradition by forcing it on someone who rejects it?
At an age when the weight of years softens even the strongest convictions and consigns lofty causes to low-priority status, I realized that I was still full of piss and vinegar, that little had calmed the storm within and that, if pushed against a wall, I was ready for a fight.
SEVEN
“We all know who you are,” said Yossi, “how you reason, what you’ve said and done. But this is family. If tradition is to be served, if harmony is to reign, we must allow some measure of flexibility and....”
“Abraham is family, yet....”
“Abraham hasn’t changed.”
“Neither have I. The freedoms that sustained me then sustain me now.”
“Have no fear. You’ll not be constrained. We’ll grant you ample philosophical latitude. Of course, we hope you’ll not misuse or abuse it by spreading it indiscriminately.”
Yossi chuckled. I wasn’t amused.
“You’re full of shit. You’re granting me the freedom to hang onto to my convictions only to impose undefined limits upon them? That’s something I can’t and won’t comply with.”
“We are heir to our past. Our memories define us. Our traditions sustain us. All we ask is that you not vilify them.”
“The memories to which you cling have a way of distorting the past and encroaching on the present. You’re all so intent on preserving these petrified memories that you devise new ones as a bulwark against change. Memories? Traditions? All you’re doing is glorifying a dull, unhygienic, inconvenient, conformist, trite, unimaginative, regressive, self-righteous, stifling and antiquated past.”
Yossi was livid but said nothing.
“Give him a few days to think it over,” barked Meema. “He’ll come to his senses sooner or later.”
Néné Buby grimaced, squealed and seconded the motion.
“You have a week,” Yossi decreed. “We’re counting on you. Do not shame us by declining. Do not challenge prophecy. Let’s not quarrel with God.”
“You don’t get it, do you? You haven’t heard a word I’ve said: I'm like a top-loading washing machine: I agitate. That’s how I was built. That’s how I must function. I spoke honestly and offered cogent reasons why I should be disqualified. Instead, you’re all blinded by ideology and bent on re-staging, like automatons, what you believe to be some unalterable cosmic drama. Sooner or later, my apostasy, my intractability will be met with more than impatience or bitterness. How long before one of you, pushed to the limit, responds by putting a bullet through my head?”
“A lot of good it’d do,” Meema snickered in a low breath. “Besides, the boy has no conscience.”
My grandfather stopped buffing the barrel of his gun and looked at the others.
*
What is a conscience? Does anyone really have a notion of it that matches what it truly represents? Or are we talking about that hasty impulse that pits reason against the current? I’m not saying that we ought to live without morals. Morals are indispensable, especially in the confines of a collective existence. Humans ask themselves and each other moral questions all the time, according to their temperaments, faculties and limitations. It’s not a matter of alienating morality, of living on its fringes, but of living beyond it. Morality predates man’s codified mandates. To ponder a moral problem is to confess that one may not be innately virtuous and that therefore one must aspire to virtue in order to fill a need.
“Virtue does not render man happy,” said Spinoza, “Happiness renders man virtuous.”
You ask, “How does one become virtuous?” A better question is, “how does one become free?” I know the answer. And there are those out there who would lock me away for fear that I might blurt it out.
*
Pity the muckraker. His travail is dissonant, his art off-key, his output seldom more than the disfigured fragments of a straying spirit in search of its worldly self. He seeks neither comfort nor reward for disrobing reality. He only wants to fondle the moods and emotions he unearths as he strays along a maze strewn with pitfalls. It is the moods these metamorphoses convey, the dismay, the outrage they might possibly elicit, that makes him reach for a pen, not the urge to enlighten or entertain. He will ventilate the shadows, stir the most offensive exhalations, but he can promise no Light, impart no wisdom, deliver no eternal truth. He conforms to no particular communion. He’s afflicted with an exquisite curse: He was baptized in ink. It is in the blackness of night, where ideas incubate, that ink runs swiftest and deepest of all. I know. I’ve been swept in its ebbs and flows, never sunk, willing to risk drowning again and again with each pen stroke. The voyage is fraught with perils; the course is uncharted. It is the very nature of such journeys that compels those who embark on their diaphanous wings to ask themselves, sooner or later, whether it was wise to leave hearth and home when the old armchair felt so good, when the winds of conformity sang alluringly upon the moonlit waters of the inlet, there before them. For they are apt to discover on arrival at some uncharted port-of-call, as I did when I reached Ein Sof, that there had been no compelling reason to make the trek in the first place. For when all is said and done, at the very conclusion of their aimless peregrination, weary and confused, they will wisely conclude, as I did, that some ideals are not meant to be aimed at, let alone exceeded.
EIGHT
I can’t adequately measure the anger I felt toward those pigheaded dinosaurs, a kind of pointless rage that obnoxious little brats arouse in the saintliest of parents. You know me. I have no beef with God. We parted ways long ago. The “s
upernatural” and mysticism are realms in which I have set neither mind nor foot. I accept the proposition that some unquantifiable energy orchestrates the rhythms of evolution and unleashes the cataclysmic spasms that convulse the universe. But since I never found any evidence of a finicky and vengeful paranormal over-achiever, I tossed the subject in the trash bin of speculation, irrationality and blind faith. Nor has the presumed existence of a workaholic creator/judge/jury/executioner ever inspire in me the slightest urge to worship it.
I also resented the prophets Yossi and his minions kept quoting: Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Habakkuk, and their disciples for endorsing and augmenting with their own terrifying hallucinations the wrath that the Almighty threatens to unleash -- should they err -- on his beloved people. And it is only insofar as the prophecies were legitimized by catastrophes, from Genesis to the Crusades, from the “Holy” Inquisition to Armenia, from the ovens of Auschwitz to the killing fields of Cambodia, Rwanda, Sudan and beyond, that historical events have assumed the kind of metaphysical sentimentality that keeps otherwise lucid human beings in a state of controlled terror.
Prophets? Antiquity’s talking heads. Prognosticators, soothsayers, fortunetellers and mystic diviners who spoke in riddles and esoteric babble designed to inspire awe and fear in the hearts of the masses. They must all have been bombed out of their heads on hallucinogenic mushrooms, cannabis, hashish, coca leaves and toad secretions; Resistol shoe glue had not yet been invented. They suffered from acute megalomania, monomania, egomania and a terminal case of thanatomania: a consuming preoccupation with death. They would all have been diagnosed as certifiably insane had modern psychiatry been available to people cowed by superstition, trembling with fear, pickled in gooey mysticism and predisposed to treat all inexplicable natural phenomena as the mysterious manifestation of an enigmatic, invisible spirit.
