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

creator/arbiter/destroyer seemed ludicrous to me even as a boy. By the time I was old enough to reflect on the enormity of my parents’ suffering, especially during the German occupation of France, their indifference to religion had turned to embittered antagonism -- my father’s early childhood religious upbringing and my mother’s genteel, pseudo-assimilation into a Christian mainstream notwithstanding. Struck with pancreatic cancer, my mother had endured several months of martyrdom and died convinced that religion is a travesty and a fraud. Heartbroken, my father, a physician, grieved at the fragility of the human body and railed against the staggering imperfection of medical science. He spent the rest of his days in the company of a cantankerous cat mourning my mother and perusing and annotating the Bible -- the Old Testament (he considered the New Testament a preposterous fantasy, its final chapter, the Book of Revelation, the ghastly hallucinations of a psychopath) -- not to seek inspiration or comfort, but to vilify it, to find the contradictions and highlight the aberrations, to poke a wrathful finger at God’s unfathomable cruelty, to denounce man’s limitless taste for evil.

      My father and I had often chatted long into the night about religion. We were not in pursuit of salvation; our tête-à-têtes were simply exercises in pure reasoning. We agreed that the underpinnings of religion -- mysticism, the supernatural, the credo quia absurdum (I believe BECAUSE it is absurd), faith in an invisible entity, the rituals, the taboos, the hellish penalties -- had all been contrived to enslave man, not to free him. We acknowledged the outwardly chivalrous but simplistic precepts of the “Golden Rule,” or Ethic of Reciprocity, present in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (but probably of more ancient Buddhist provenance) but pointed at man’s inclination to ignore it, even violate it, in the name of Yahweh, Theo and Allah. We quoted from Hillel the Elder, the 1^st century BCE rabbi who summed up the Torah with the command, “What is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor.” We read Luke (6:31), which teaches, “Treat others as you want them to treat you.” Last, we turned to the Koran’s lofty counsel, “No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother that which he desires for himself.”

      But “others,” “neighbor” and “brother,” we surmised, have a parochial meaning that, history has shown, signifies “those of our own kind -- us, not them.”

      This dichotomy would be astutely dissected two decades later by journalist Christiane Amanpour in CNN’s God’s Warriors: The Clash Between Piety and Politics. Rebroadcast several times since its first airing in August 2007, the three-part award-winning documentary offers a disturbing rendering of the three major religions’ penchant for violence in the service of deity. It also lays bare their unceasing effort to manipulate civil society through indoctrination, intimidation, civil disobedience and, all else failing, swift, copious bloodshed.

      Carried to its extremes, God’s Warriors had shown, religion is a dangerous eccentricity that will render men insane. Only religious delirium could inspire a Muslim to plot the “honor killing” of his own daughter, or to bomb a disco filled with Jewish youths. Only mystical rapture could lead a self-styled Christian to murder doctors performing legal abortions. Only a Jewish zealot could violate the Torah, slaughter Muslims gathered in prayer in their mosque, torch cars on the Sabbath or assault members of a peaceful Gay Pride parade and threaten violence if the Jerusalem police chief allowed the pageant to proceed.

      This is the bare face of religion, my father and I had concluded. This is how religion transforms men into zombies, societies into citadels of intolerance, incubators in which simmers the hatred of heretics -- those who, according to the Vatican, ”hold different beliefs” or grant themselves the inalienable right to hold none. Within that conflict rests the unresolved tension between the command to “love one's enemies” and the equally strong injunction to reject and eradicate any alien or divergent dogma. In the final analysis, my father and I had reasoned, neither Jew, nor Christian or Muslim knows which of the two directives to follow at any given time. By attacking “heretics” as tools of Satan, religious fanatics seize the rhetorical high ground and shift the focus from embracing one’s fellow man to the escapist option of waging war against an imaginary but prescriptive source of evil.

      This catch 22 was the preeminent rationale for a succession of gruesome confrontations in which only Yahweh, Theo or Allah could triumph: the Crusades, the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, the Inquisition, the 30-Years War, the centuries-old strife in Northern Ireland, the Armenian and Jewish Holocausts, the Hutu-Tutsi reciprocal slaughter, the Hindu-Moslem-Sikh rivalries in India and Kashmir, the bloodbath in Sudan and the cyclic carnage between Shia and Sunni Muslims.

      *

      It was soon after my father’s death -- I was 50, he was 83 -- troubled by his stormy apostasy and anxious to jettison some of my own dismissive preconceptions that I ventured for the first time in the Kabbalah’s arcane realm. Enthralled and bewildered at first, often driven to mental exhaustion, I eventually tired of its multilayered circularity, contradictions and maddening esotericism. I was not being ushered into some liberating “beyond.” Rather, I was being shoved and jostled and inveigled to probe the “nothingness” that dwells within. I found such mental pirouettes more taxing than I’d imagined. Faced with the imponderable -- the very essence of Kabbalah -- I bowed out, humbled by the magnificence of paradox. All in all, my brief but intense foray into Kabbalah was not in vain. Careful, measured readings yielded fresh insights on the magnitude of the Mosaic ideal and the depth of Jewish thought. I would later marvel at the influence it would have on the works of Pico Della Mirandola, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, Emmanuel Swedenborg, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida. I would also discover that the root of Kabbalistic doctrine had been enunciated, much earlier and in considerably simpler language, in the Tao and other Buddhist teachings. No matter the originality of a concept -- “There is nothing new under the sun” (King Solomon; Ecclesiastes, 1.9) I must believe that I too was transformed, however imperceptibly, by the Kabbalah’s awesome and wrenching cerebral exactions.

      When the distinction between material reality and mysticism become muddled, faith loses its mythical pretenses and one quickly dispenses with God.

      *

      Imagination is not inventive; it only perceives the latency of an eventuality.

      JOURNALIST OR GRAVEDIGGER?

      It was a winter dawn heavy with clouds the color of pewter. Frost had formed overnight and patches of rime speckled the railing where I stood, an unknown emptiness now claiming a share of my jumbled emotions.

      I’d awakened early and gone up on deck to see the Statue of Liberty, ready to weep with ritual if unfelt reverence, eager to surrender like a pilgrim at a holy shrine to its symbolism and physicality. But the androgynous, vacant-eyed stone-faced monolith had loomed across the bow; it had risen against the drab grayness of New York’s concrete piers, fuming smokestacks and decaying wooden hangars, then receded on the port side.

      To my dismay, the titan elicited none of the prescribed passions or susceptibilities. I found it stiff, almost intimidating: it lacked the stirring vigor or mythic grace I had envisioned. I’d often glimpsed its diminutive twins, one under the chestnut trees in the Jardin du Luxembourg where I played as a child, the other perched on a battlement overlooking the Seine. Both, I thought -- my sense of observation now in doubt -- exuded more charm, if not splendor, than the square-jawed icon with the sphinxlike gaze towering above New York Harbor.

      “America! America!” cried out a man as he surveyed the unfolding scene. He was at my elbow by the railing. I’d not seen him draw near. His hands were clasped against his chest the way people hail a miracle or flinch before a great calamity, and he was shaking his head from side to side as if his eyes and his soul were not yet in sync. Gaunt, weather-beaten, a week-old ashen stubble adding age to his years, he seemed to be inhaling the colossal spectacle, the unimaginable enormity that is New York. Every pore, every crevice on his brow spoke of life endured, hopes deflected, fears surmounted and, now, it seemed, dreams fulfilled.

      I would have given anything to know his exhilaration, to share in his feelings of redemption, to consecrate with tears of gratitude my own ascension to the Promised Land.

      “Yes.