Letter #234: Outward Bound

Trajectory is All

Spensoir.

Reading your last, I was reminded of an old joke. Well, not an old joke, but a joke by an old person, namely me. I have often remarked that, while many people are born into their faith, my life was more like an Outward Bound program where they drop you off in the middle of the wilderness with a paperclip and a piece of string and you have to use the materials at hand to make your way home.

This is true in so many ways.

Trajectory is incredibly important in life. Individual, group, or nation, if you are on the road to disaster, the misery will set in even before you reach road’s end. Conversely, you only have to turn around and your life will begin to improve.

I was not born at the peak of atheism, but I was born when atheism among sophisticates was on an upward trajectory. It was, as Carly Simon sang, hip to be miserable when you were young and intellectual. That was one reason it took me so long to realize I was not just miserable, I was actually going insane. It was why I was determined not to reach out to the God whose existence I already suspected: it would have simply confirmed the going notion that faith was a crutch, a "denial of death" as one popular book of the time phrased it.

And then, as you point out, there was my personal situation: a Jew in a household that was almost entirely secular. You can tell how I feel about antisemites by the way I wrinkle my nose whenever I accidentally step on one and have to scrape him off my shoe. But there’s one move they make that strikes me as the most flagrant display of their overall stupidity. This is when they cherry pick some quote from the Talmud to show that Jews are “anti-Christian.” Oh really? Jews suffered two thousand years of violence and oppression from Christians. They’d have had to be nuts or masochistic to like Christianity.

As a result, it is very, very difficult for a Jew to accept that Christianity may be the simple truth. This is why you get so many intelligent secular Jews of good will — Stephen Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, Paul Bloom, Carl Sagan — tying themselves in intellectual knots to avoid the fact of God’s existence. So it was with me as well.

I have often asked God: Why did you let me wander in the wilderness so long before you brought me over Jordan? The only answer I’ve received is this: So I would learn all the wrong trajectories.

Still, even at the worst, I was never alone. I may have been dropped in the wilderness with the rudest of tools, but one tool was this: I knew that human perception was not a delusion and ought to make sense. That was the paperclip and string out of which I made a compass that pointed the way.

Love, Dad