My young life followed the domino pattern set in motion when Wall Street crashed on October 29, 1929, the event most historians view as the one that lifted the Nazi party out of political obscurity and subsequently paved the way to World War II. The Americans' demand for repayment of their loans, together with the swift collapse of the German export market. led to the almost overnight eradication of the German middle class—in brief, the perfect set-up for Hitler's long-awaited rise to power.
Virulent Indifference by Martin List, MD, deceased, 2007
Martin List had the most amazing smile. He passed in 2007, right after landing a traditional publisher, so his book never made it to press. We had very little yet everything in common, both being ardent Jews and equally ardent atheists.
Marty somehow held onto his faith as the Nazis consigned his older sister to service German soldiers. He acted with God-sanctioned vengeance when he killed a former neighbor’s son after said neighbor hunted down his mother and little sister to shoot them in cold blood. But when he had to crawl inside himself, silent and still, as his father and brother were discovered, machine-gunned, and buried in the very holes they’d dug with their fingers deep in the forest, his last thread of belief snapped. There was no God. Believer to infidel in the space of a pulled trigger.
I understood. How could he exalt his ancestors’ “Our Father, Our King” when man had so utterly proven such a creature existed not? Thus unfettered, Marty had no reason not to do everything necessary to stay alive… to jeer at dying Germans begging for water… to give more than a half-a-shrug when the Russian who rescued him abruptly shot The Great Escape’s prisoner-of-war camp Commandant[1]. Righteousness easily replaced fake morality.
My own elevation was slower and more civilized, but just as unqualified. Both sets of my grandparents had fled Brooklyn’s cult-like orthodox restraints long before the war. Both families, in fact, had immigrated from places I knew not, at least one if not two generations earlier. Yet none had renounced the tribe, its chosen-inity, or its tale-and-ritual-depicted Creator, so I spent my formative decades questioning but nevertheless resigned to, first, a gendered deity, then to a dual-gendered higher power. Neither made the slightest sense, their various mythologies full of plot holes and character implausibilities. Eventually though, all the repetitively strained prayer, allusions to God’s mysterious ways, and the 613 commandments coerced into semi-feasibility by pilpul (intense, unreasonably subtle analysis) reinterpretation did me in. I could neither deny being Jew nor my spiritual connection to the great beyond—but that’s an existence, not a being (divine or otherwise).
I know that makes me an apostate in the eyes of all who feel obliged to name, to worship, to follow in the footsteps of, to envision an authority over and above. If nothing else, my spiritualist friends and acquaintances tell me, I must accept their genericized “higher power” or “divine intelligence” euphemism. Alas, if nothing else, I don’t. Been there, gently disengaged from that. Everything I’ve read, heard, and experienced affirms that it’s all so totally… what’s the word? Unnecessary.
Do I honestly believe no one—no thing—stands behind the creation of all? I honestly non-know or care. If such a power or entity does exist, he/she/they/it certainly needs no input or adoration from me or my kind. I non-entertain “But what if there is?” mythologies the same way I dismiss, “What if you were born a cat?” queries. Perhaps I once was or will be, but not in this lifetime, making any imaginings along those lines fiction. Fiction is fun to read, but it is, by its very nature, not real.
Oh, andplease don’t pretend my essence—my soul, my eternal life—is somehow diminished because I non-fear, non-glorify a carrot-dangling/stick-wielding, ineffable, deliberately mysterious creature whose thoughts and purposes are too great for me to comprehend. I admire J.K. Rowling’s literary genius, but that doesn’t mean flying brooms are real.
But even if they were—even if the thoughts and spoken words I simultaneously send out to the cosmos and into my connection to the same were sensed, heard, and/or responded to by such a he/she/they/it creature—so what? Go ahead and call that the god within, for all I care. Life, the universe, the intricacy of caterpillar-to-chrysalis-to-butterfly is both too simple and too complex to have been written by a single author. If’n I believe in anything, I’m comfortable with what George Lucas called “the force”… what quantum physicists theorize as the zero-point field… what philosophers have recognized as intuition since the dawn of, well, philosophers.
Energy cannot be created or destroyed. Thought is energy. Ergo, my answers are always well within reach whenever, however I want them. Inside me—that geezer of a turtle who’s been lying, hiding, and denying at peak performance for seventy-plus years in this wrongly gendered body. That’s reality. Nonfiction. It’s what makes being nonbinary/transgender so complicated. If some supernatural power deliberately set up humans to be as convoluted and contradictory as we are, then so be it.
My connection to said force/field/intuition exists. Full stop. And while I certainly appreciate the attachment, it’s automatic, a “what is.” In the final analysis—well, there is no final analysis. Life is momentary. My security can be shattered in an instant by forces beyond my control. Love fades, fortunes disappear, even as new pleasures peek around dark corners. I am but a miniscule speck in a vastness beyond perception,[2] constrained by the culture into which I was born, with only one true choice. I can spend my time and energies deciphering the inexplicable, a logically preposterous exercise, or I can fulfill a higher purpose and serve my fellows. The former, being manifestly impossible, seems a monumental and misguided waste, akin to writing a nonfiction book full of theoretical knowledge with scant, if any, practical application.
Thanks, but I’ll pass.
[1] The Great Escape, 1963 film, screenplay by Paul Brickhill, James Clavell, and W.R. Burnett, directed by John Sturges, based on the true story.
[2] If you truly believe those realities are the work of a single all-knowing, all-seeing, all benevolent, all loving creature, please put $100 in an envelope and send it to me. My grandpa used to ask for $2, but hey—times have changed.
You may know, I was bred from Atheist roots... And somehow came to the same conclusions.
This line: " Life, the universe, the intricacy of caterpillar-to-chrysalis-to-butterfly is both too simple and too complex to have been written by a single author."
and this "I am but a miniscule speck in a vastness beyond perception,[2] constrained by the culture into which I was born, with only one true choice. I can spend my time and energies deciphering the inexplicable, a logically preposterous exercise, or I can fulfill a higher purpose and serve my fellows."
Brilliant wordsmithing as always. ✨