I’m a psychoanalyst … late-middle-aged. The above cartoon appeared I-don’t-know-where and portrays the disinterested analyst … the transactional one … like Dulcinea in the Broadway LaMancha: “One pair of arms is like another … I don’t care why or who’s to blame. I’ll go with you or with you brother … It’s all the same.”
I would be uncomfortable had I this attitude (in the cartoon). I was uncomfortable with Trump about being this way … transactional … but, like many, I still thought that he would never occupy the Oval Office and could be amused by him. Then, there were the attacks on the Khans and an interview soon thereafter in which he was asked if he had ever sacrificed. …. “Well, yes. I gave lots (maybe he said thousands) of people jobs.” This failure to understand any kind of social contract … any reciprocity between himself and someone in a work/pay relationship with him … really got to me. It seemed evil.
My notion of decency comes from certain aspirational goals set out by Torah that make it impossible for me to see those who visit me transactionally, as “clients.” The word “clients comes from the Latin cliens and referred to an agreement by which a lower class voter accepted protection from a higher class one, in exchange for their vote. Even that was better than Trump’s notion that every dime he gave to a worker was a sacrifice for him. Yuch. Now. I and my visitors may transact but that is not the basis of our relationship.
The Torah reading today was Moses’ lengthy Poem by the Sea and Miriam’s brief one. In some traditions, one whispers the parts of Moses’ poem, Oz Yashir (אז ישיר), that deal with Pharaoh’s Army getting their asses kicked … to remember (as, I think, Rashi notes) that God was not pleased that his creatures were being drowned in the Sea and Moses was waxing poetic and in song.
The reading goes on to include 6 of the situations when The Wandering Jewish Immigrants kvetched about how much they had given up and how much they missed the security of Egypt … and its fleshpots. I recalled that 40 years was a long time. It occurred to me that the last time my wife and kids moved was 40 years ago when the kids were 3, 11 and 12. How many kerfuffles had there been in our little polity?
I then began thinking about the morning prayers … expressions of gratitude and thanks. I like reading the Shachris (the prayers before Torah reading). Is it about my relationship to God? I don’t rightly know. I then thought of Woody Allen’s argument that any allegiance to a religion, any chauvinism, at all, potentially moved people closer to War. He suggested that Tikkun Magazine strip itself of the word Jewish in its subtitle. I disagreed … but why? What bothered me?
Something about affiliation to a tribe was clearly important to me. I do consider myself a Jew but is it only about a relationship to a god? I could feel equally comfortable if my God was called Allah, Jesus, Vishnu or Rory Calhoun! Maimonides wrote that in a letter somewhere … that certainly monotheistic religious folk must all be praying to the same one god. No, for me, there was something special about belonging to a tribe.
I think I’m at least as much a skeptic as I am a Psychoanalyst, so, what I’m about to say is by way of hypothesis … maybe a thought experiment. It, also, occurred to me that I’ve already outlived my 70 years allocation of years in Psalm 34 (part of Shachris). It does say, I might get 80 if I’m endowed with warrior attributes (גבורות). I have some health problems. Ach du lieber … I think I’m already on overtime.
So, why not despair? Erik Erikson said that Old Timers either begin to share with the upstarts (generativity, he called it) or they tend to despair. But why should I share with the up-and-comers? … Then, my hypothesis came. Something like: I am quite finite. I suppose my tribe has a limited shelf-life, as well, but devotion to the polity, to the community simultaneously accepts my mortality and gives me both a sense that I am part of a larger living germ cell and the responsibilities that flow from that allegiance.
Now, there is a problem and I’ll bring it back to the elected President’s lack of empathic connection to any group except those that, as the kids say, suck his dick. I don’t yet know how to articulate it but it goes something like this. If I can only accept value in myself and those who support me, why should I have any concern for anyone who is likely to be around when I’m gone? It is, indeed, the case, then, that: apres moi le deluge for folk who think this way.
To be virtuous … righteous … decent … I must connect to something bigger than myself. A god? Maybe. But, then again, if the only relationship that matters is mine with the Lord, then, for God’s sake, it all ends at the Pit … Sheol …. שאול … anyway.
Maybe any relationship with a god is predicated on a relationship to a community whose existence transcends my own in scope and time … my relationship is to the Totem Clan as much as to the Totem. Now, need I add, to do this one must go beyond one’s own needs, see others as Subjects in Their Own Right, and be thus … part of a Tribe.
Oh! I find myself laughing. I suspect that I’ve just said the obvious ... but it was never obvious to me, until, that is, I sat in Shul reading those prayers this morning and thinking about the Wandering Desert Jews with whom I feel a kinship.
I get it, now. “I’m a Jew” and a psychoanalyst and a member of Parents and Grandparents Anonymous … and I feel a connection to other groups, as well. I feel at peace with those designations and hope my Sisters and Brothers in other groups come to feel the same pride in affiliating within their groups. I pronounce myself: beneficently chauvinistic!
Elders of Zion/Daily Kos is another one of the groups in which I experience this feeling of kinship though I don’t know that I have any extra-EoZ connections to anyone here.
With these random thoughts and wishes for a good week …. Howard