Coping with my anger and contempt

I can’t agree as a Jew with Arthur Brooks’ statement at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday in The Washington Post that we should now turn our contempt for the “other” into love. I don’t think this way as a Jew, especially as I ruminate about the cowardice of the Republicans to hold the President to account for his proven abuse of power and obstruction of Congress and about the President’s hubris, lack of empathy, and contempt for the constitutional constraints placed on the Executive branch.

For my complete statement, see my blog at the Times of Israel – https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/coping-with-my-anger-and-contempt/

Pearl Berg Celebrates her 110th Birthday

Each year, for more years than I can recall, I have offered a blessing to our oldest congregant at Temple Israel of Hollywood, Pearl Berg. Pearl is the oldest human being I have ever known. I met her 31 years ago when she was a spry 79 years old.

As the LA Times story in Saturday’s edition (February 1, 2020) notes (link below), there are perhaps 1000 people in the world who reach 110 years of age.

Pearl is still sharp, though “slowing down a bit,” according to her son Bob Berg of Washington, D.C.. Either Bob (age 79) or his older brother, Dr. Allan Berg of Philadelphia (age 82), come to visit their mother most every week.

Pearl is a marvel not only because of her age, but because she remains a positive clear-thinking kind woman whose wit and sense of humor is a constant, who welcomes graciously all visitors, who reads every day,  and plays gin rummy remembering the cards her opponent picks up – most of the time. Last June as I prepared to retire and assume Emeritus status at my synagogue, Pearl came to bid me farewell at my final service. Her appearance was one of the highlights of my last year of 40 years as a congregational rabbi.

My connection with Pearl and her family precedes my own birth. Pearl’s husband Mark (z’l) employed my mother in the early 1940s as an office worker in his Los Angeles scrap metal business when she was 25 years old. When Mark died 30 years ago and I prepared my eulogy, my mother told me that Mark was the kindest of bosses. When she departed from his business to volunteer at an army base in San Luis Obispo during World War II, Mark gave her a going-away office party. She never forgot it. My mother died 4 years ago at age of 98, and I thought that she was old – a youngster compared with Pearl.

Happy Birthday Pearl! We looking forward to celebrating your 111^th birthday next year.

See – https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-02-01/pearl-berg-110-years-old-los-angeles

Nine Evidence-Based Guidelines for a ‘Good Life’ – by Gary M. Bakker

A rabbinic colleague posted the link to this article on the Reform Rabbi list-serve and I thought it so wise and useful that I wanted to pass it along. This piece was published this month in the Skeptical Inquirer by Gary M. Bakker, a practicing clinical psychologist and clinical lecturer at the University of Tasmania, Australia, who has published in both clinical (Practical CBT) and skeptical (God: A Psychological Assessment) fields.

https://skepticalinquirer.org/2019/11/nine-evidence-based-guidelines-for-a-good-life/

 

“On the Job, 24 Hours a Day, 27 Days a Month” – NY Times, September 2

This article in Monday’s NYT hit home with both my brother and me.

Our mother died three plus years ago at the age of 98. As macular degeneration, loss of hearing, and evolving senility diminished her capacities, we persuaded her that she could no longer live on her own in her own apartment. This meant moving her out of her apartment of forty years into assisted living.

The first home we chose had a great reputation and a number of facilities in the city of Los Angeles. It trumpeted all the bells and whistles that large assisted living facilities provide, but we found the place to be grossly inadequate in the healthy and safe care of our mother.

As we packed up her belongings and prepared to move her to a new and far less expensive home (the first home’s prices kept rising every few months), we discovered that the housekeeping had not done its job very well at all. Her closets and drawers were filthy. Her clothes were thrown haphazard out of sight. She was also constantly falling and had bruises all over her body.

We decided that enough was enough and that we needed to move her to a safer home. We chose this time a far smaller home with a staff of 6 men and women who gave to our mother everything she needed and everything we hoped she would have received in the first place. I have no idea what these angels of care were paid, but we told them how fortunate we felt that they were taking such good care of our mother and treating her with such dignity, compassion, and love.

The first home was all about the investors and money, not the care of the elderly. The second home was about my mother’s care. It also cost 60% of what we paid in the first facility thereby supporting the notion that sometimes you don’t get what you pay for.

What struck both my brother and me the most in the article is that the caregiver was fine doing all that hard and often unpleasant work on the front lines for minimal income because she knew the next of kin were demonstrably grateful. That says a lot about her, to be sure. Caregivers like this woman and those who cared for our mother deserve all the accolades they rarely receive.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/02/nyregion/home-health-aide.html

 

A few moments in a Delaware supermarket check-out line

My wife and I just spent a week with friends in Millsboro, Delaware, a lovely small town 15 minutes by car from the Rohovoth shore.

One morning our host went to the store to buy bagels and the daily Washington Post. While standing in the check-out line he struck up a friendly conversation with a middle aged woman standing behind him. After a few moments she said, “You are a very nice man!”

Everything changed, however, when, reading the paper’s headlines, he said, “We’re in a real mess – aren’t we?”

She asked, “What do you mean?”

Pointing to the paper, he said: “Trump’s erratic handling of the economy, his racism, white supremacy, and misogyny are changing the country for the worse.”

“You are a very bad man,” she barked.

Stunned, he said, “But you just told me I am nice.”

“You aren’t.”

My friend’s interchange with his neighbor is a reflection of the sorry state of civility and ethics in our nation. One moment he was a “nice man” shooting the breeze with a stranger in a supermarket check-out line, and the next he was the despised and demonized “other.”

One pillar of evil is when we become an extension of ideas and not individual human beings embodying the complexity of thoughts, feelings, backgrounds, interests, and values that we all share.

The President’s base relishes its hatred of the other at his political rallies as Trump stokes their hatred of his opponents and gives succor to the crowd’s lower angels. But we Democrats demonize Trump supporters as the despised “other” as well.

We all need to check ourselves and keep from falling into this dehumanizing trap not only for our own sake but for the sake of the soul of our nation.

 

Renewal in a Toxic Political Environment

Like so many, I’ve become a news junky, especially since Donald Trump became President.

For those who care about government policy as a vehicle to help improve our nation’s quality of life, who believe in the partnership between government, the private sector, NGOs, and religious communities in moving the nation forward as a just and compassionate society, and who yearn for a foreign policy that is strategically sound, peace-oriented, and dignified – Trump is anathema.

Yet, despite my strong interest in the news, for my own well-being – and perhaps for yours too – we need to be able to step back and disengage from time to time from the toxicity of politics in general and the malignant narcissism of Trump in particular.

To these ends, I was moved this week when listening to an interview of the veteran conservative commentator George Will (a never-Trump former Republican) of The Washington Post by Preet Bharara on his “Stay Tuned with Preet” Podcast (July 18, 2019).

Will said:

“One of the invaluable messages after the political intoxications of the 20^th century is that politics should not be what defines your identity; that government has a great and stately jurisdiction but it’s not everything. And if you are looking for excitement; if you are looking for spiritual fulfillment; if you are looking for the meaning in life, don’t look to politics because we see what happens when mass movements become intoxicated by political movements fighting faiths, fascism, communism and the like that try to envelop their lives – it’s not healthy.”

Our challenge, therefore, ought to be to stay engaged but maintain our emotional, psychological, spiritual, and creative balance while at the same time registering new voters, fighting voter suppression and foreign intervention in our elections, and voting in a new president and democratic controlled Senate in 2020. Along the way, as Will suggests, we need to be able to step away enough to be able nurture our hearts, minds, and souls in ways that are restorative.

 

 

The corrosive effect of hatred

In light of the Trump hate tirade this past week I offer wisdom from across the centuries on the corrosive effect of hatred on the human heart and soul:

“Thou shalt not hate another in one’s heart.” –Leviticus 19:18

“In hatred as in love, we grow like the thing we brood upon. What we loathe, we graft into our very soul.” –Mary Renault

“I feel fairly certain that my hatred harms me more than the people whom I hate.” –Max Frisch

“I can forgive the whites in America for hating the blacks; I cannot forgive them, however, for making the blacks believe that they are worthy of being hated.” –James Baldwin

“Never let yourself hate any person. It is the most devastating weapon of one’s enemies.” –Katherine Hepburn’s father

“Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.” –Eric Hoffer

“Love, friendship, respect, do not unite people as much as a common hatred for something.” –Anton Chekhov

“One of the reasons people cling to their hate so stubbornly is because they sense that once hate is gone they will be forced to deal with pain.” –James Baldwin

“In time we hate that which we often fear.” –William Shakespeare

“Hatred is the coward’s revenge for being intimidated.” –George Bernard Shaw

“Never waste a minute thinking about people you don’t like.” –Dwight D. Eisenhower

“I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him.” –Booker T. Washington

“No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to their human heart than its opposite.” –Nelson Mandela

“We must admit to ourselves that our own future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled nor enriched by hatred or revenge.” –Robert F. Kennedy

“Hate, it has caused a lot of problems in the world, but has not solved one yet.” –Maya Angelou

“If you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a person well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love.” –John Steinbeck

“I have decided to stick to love…Hate is too great a burden to bear.” –Martin Luther King Jr.

 

 

 

A Matter of Character

In his book Tyrant – Shakespeare on Politics, Stephen Greenblatt (John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University) probes the nature of tyranny in the works of Shakespeare. Greenblatt focuses particularly on the character of Richard III.

I offer one passage but recommend the entire short volume (189 pages):

“Shakespeare’s Richard III brilliantly develops the personality features of the aspiring tyrant already sketched in the Henry VI trilogy: the limitless self-regard, the law-breaking, the pleasure in inflicting pain, the compulsive desire to dominate. He is pathologically narcissistic and supremely arrogant. He has a grotesque sense of entitlement, never doubting that he can do whatever he chooses. He loves to bark orders and to watch underlings scurry to carry them out. He expects absolute loyalty, but he is incapable of gratitude. The feelings of others mean nothing to him. He has no natural grace, no sense of shared humanity, no decency.

He is not merely indifferent to the law; he hates it and takes pleasure in breaking it. He hates it because it gets in his way and because it stands for a notion of the public good that he holds in contempt. He divides the world into winners and losers. The winners arouse his regard insofar as he can use them for his own ends; the losers arouse only his scorn. The public good is something only losers like to talk about. What he likes to talk about is winning.

He has always had wealth; he was born into it and makes ample use of it. But though he enjoys having what money can get him, it is not what most excites him. What excites him is the joy of domination. He is a bully. Easily enraged, he strikes out at anyone who stands in his way. He enjoys seeing others cringe, tremble, or wince with pain. He is gifted at detecting weakness and deft at mockery and insult. These skills attract followers who are drawn to the same cruel delight, even if they cannot have it to his unmatched degree. Though they know that he is dangerous, the followers help him advance to his goal, which is the possession of supreme power.

His possession of power includes the domination of women, but he despises them far more than desires them. Sexual conquest excites him, but only for the endlessly reiterated proof that he can have anything he likes. He knows that those he grabs hate him. For that matter, once he has succeeded in seizing the control that so attracts him, in politics as in sex, he knows that virtually everyone hates him. At first that knowledge energizes him, making him feverishly alert to rivals and conspiracies. But it soon begins to eat away at him and exhaust him.

Sooner or later, he is brought down. He dies unloved and un-lamented. He leaves behind only wreckage. It would have been better had Richard III never been born.” (pages 53-54)

Though Greenblatt published this study of tyranny in 2018 in the midst of the Trump era, it is the character of Richard III – after all – that he describes in his brilliant short work. Before his death, Philip Roth endorsed the book with these words: “Brilliant, beautifully organized, exceedingly readable.”

And remarkably current!

 

 

 

 

Retirement into Re-fire-ment

I’ve been preparing for retirement for some time, and I’m now days from leaving the position I’ve held for 30 years and the profession in which I’ve worked for 40 years. I’ve read many books about this “encore” period of one’s life as well what this new life stage means and might be.

This past week a friend sent me a link to an essay in The Atlantic called “Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think – Here’s how to make the most of it” by Arthur C. Brooks (July, 2019).

Brooks describes life’s trajectory from one’s 30s to 80s, when we peak intellectually and professionally, and when the capacities upon which we depend for work success begin to decline. He describes as well the nature of success at different ages, and what brings us the greatest happiness in each life stage.

See my complete blog at the Times of Israel – https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/retirement-into-re-fire-ment/

Tristan and Iseult – Courtly Love and Covenant

The Jungian therapist Robert Johnson wrote in a little book called “We”:

“Here we are confronted with a paradox that baffles us, yet we should not be surprised to discover that romantic love is connected with spiritual aspiration – even with our religious instinct – for we already know that courtly love, at its very beginning so many centuries ago, was understood as spiritual love, a way of loving that spiritualized the knight with his lady, and raised them above the ordinary and the gross to an experience of another world, an experience of soul and spirit.”

I discuss the medieval myth of Tristan and Iseult the Fair in the context of this week’s Torah portion Bamidbar, the Biblical prophet Hosea, and the Festival of Shavuot that begins this Saturday night as similar expressions of spiritual love.

To read my d’var Torah, you can find it on my blog at the Times of Israel at https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/tristan-and-iseult-courtly-love-and-covenant/