A Paler Shade of Red: Memoirs of a Radical. W. E. Gutman

my father before me, I’d spent countless hours “meandering in stupefied fascination” through the Kabbalah’s cerebral minefields. The leaps of comprehension, not to mention the leaps of faith the Kabbalah demands, would leave me exhausted and confused. However enthralling, my excursions were inspired by a need to know, not a need to belong.

      “I think, therefore I doubt,” I’d exclaimed at last when I awoke from a blinding sleep and shed the last vestiges of forbearance for senseless beliefs. Nine-tenths of my family had perished in Hitler’s gas chambers and the “inscrutability of God’s designs,” at best an offensive rationale, had since acquired the stench of a loathsome affront. I rejected the notion that man is born sullied by some “primal offense,” that pain ennobles the soul and that sentient beings need to be ruled by an arbitrary system of faith-based values and protocols. In religion’s imaginary goodness, I discovered not a path to enlightenment but an instrument of deceit and emotional enslavement. The transformation from fence-straddler to mutineer was gradual, filled with misgivings. At first, I found religion’s mystique inscrutable. I’d meandered through its occluded allegories and bizarre canons like an explorer in a strange, uncharted wasteland. I’d glimpsed the very faint light that religion claims to shed but found only vast and gloomy shadows. It is in the shadows that my senses, now accustomed to the darkness, caught sight of a glow, a radiant luminosity that rinsed my pupils free of the gritty debris of credulity. I now understood that blind faith, not truth; prejudice and fear, not common sense, threaten humankind and condemn it to bondage.

      Like others before me, I’d absent-mindedly tolerated sundry propositions and viewpoints along the way, some of which I even peddled, parrot-like, out of stupidity or intellectual sloth, not for the intrinsic virtues with which they were ostensibly endowed.

      Assembly-line rearing, fashionable in the days of my youth, had instilled a value system that seemed strange if not utterly without merit. I’d been coached by otherwise doting parents to defer to authority with robot-like reverence. Be polite; do not innovate. Honor your elders. Respect your teachers. Salute your superiors. Obey the boss. Comply with the mandates of the public order. In short, I was to idolize or at least yield to all species of adults of dubious pedigree who had by now forgotten what it feels like to look at a very menacing world from three feet off the ground.

      In school, I’d been programmed by coldhearted masters to smile or fight back the tears, to subdue, sometimes to smother very raw feelings under the pretext that such perfunctory bearing is what society expects of a good little boy and later, of a mensch. Precocious and sly, I knew I was not and could never be a good little boy. Nor did I aspire to menschhood, a status not clearly defined or imagined at the time. But I understood that pretending to do what others anticipate -- feigning religion, simulating approval of orthodox concepts, conforming to time-honored trends -- can bring on small rewards or, at the very least, shield one from censure, reprimand or retribution -- all of which I eventually incurred when I tired of pretending and transitioned at last from conciliation and irresolution to open defiance.

      Later, as my peripheral vision improved and my depth perception sharpened, I began to ask questions: Why are we susceptible to pain and defenseless against the fury of disasters -- natural and manmade -- that, religion insists, are wrought against us “for mysterious reasons” by some fickle supernatural force? 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 throngs who call on him and seek his succor? What perverted despot decrees that his subjects will recite words not their own, that they will blindly obey the injunctions of self-anointed envoys, tremble at their threats and admonitions, mouth off supplications and jeremiads and parrot guilt-ridden prayers of indebtedness and veneration, 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?

      The questions, mulled over when I was still very young, were in fact declaratory statements conjugated in the interrogative. This I believe: at best, religion is divisive, repressive, irrational and detrimental to the pursuit of harmony among men. It belongs, if at all, in houses of worship or at home. It has no place in the bedroom, schools and government, much less in the crafting of a national psyche or the shaping of policy. At its worst, it’s a form of psychosis.

      Karl Marx was right. “Religion is the opiate of the people.” But unlike opium, which surrenders users to a state of blissful lethargy, religion inflames passions and brings the worst in man. The sectarian hatreds and paroxysms of ferocious religiosity that convulse the planet epitomize religion’s toxic character. Eventually, I would conclude that “God” is a useless and costly hypothesis with which I could dispense. And crypto-agnosticism turned into overt atheism.

      Atheists don’t wage wars to protect their right not to believe. There may come a time when they must.

      *

      Late in life, overwhelmed 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 the rich Yiddish literature he had savored in his youth, describing it as “insular, ethnocentric and self-absorbed.” Told and retold, Hassidic tales, with their subtle masochism, their sly subordination to divine will and fatalism toward human evil, seemed to magnify and reaffirm the Jewish “shtettel” [small-town] mentality he had fought so hard to escape. He would continue to read the Bible, however, until the end of his life. Far from seeking comfort, he was looking to discredit hallowed heroes -- Abraham, David and Joshua (he called them “thugs”), to challenge cherished convictions by pointing to the recorded lies, the betrayals, the greed, the violence, the cruelty, the bestial godlessness of man, the insufferable inhumanity of God. Proclaiming 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. Among his most contentious compositions was a stinging pastiche in which he lampooned the Biblical Abraham for his lack of moral fiber -- “the man had no balls” -- and derided his wife, Sarah, for her conceit and heartlessness. He characterized their ingratitude toward their host, the Pharaoh, as “harlotry.”

      Having concluded that man is stimulated by instinct, selfishness and greed, and that “divine edicts” are “fantastical aberrations,” he attacked the beliefs and traditions of his people. The piece was published in a Jewish periodical in New York, drawing instant fury from scores of readers.

      Accused of heresy by fellow Jews, many of them fellow Sigheters, 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 short time before he died, 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. Do it in private, alone with your conscience, shielded from partisan influences and purged of all acquired knowledge.

      The truth he’d 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 by 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 hope that he may have died at odds with the world but at peace with himself.

      Thought cannot distance itself from its point of origin. The mind is incapable of self-scrutiny.

      *

      I come from a household where the word “God” was never uttered -- except as an exclamation -- and death or the hereafter had no place at the dinner-table, either in a mystical or existential context.