From Self to Spirit — Art Katz

Let's see if what was cogent and alive at 3 o 'clock this morning is equally alive now. Only if you're a minister of the word will you know what I'm talking about. When the Lord has you up at absurd hours and something comes to life that you're ready then to pour out, but no, it has to wait until 1120 and often when you open up to see the thing that was riveting and so powerfully alive in God eight hours earlier has somehow gone flat and you wondered what were you excited about?

And just to add fuel to the fire, the Lord does not allow me to open again the Bible or the thing that I was seeing until the actual time of speaking. So Lord, Lord, quicken and make alive what was so vital in my spirit in the early morning hours while these saints were turning over and enjoying their rest.

You were stirring my spirit. Come and stir it again. We want to hear the now present truth as it is in Christ Jesus. So I'm asking the miracle of proclamation and the miracle of hearing. Ruin us Lord, give us something this morning that will devastate us for all the future.

Returning to Apostolic Authenticity

We cannot go on as we were before. Bring us back to the early, original, pristine, authentic, apostolic reality that made the church the church. It's time. This abuse us of any notion, thought, disposition that has become current, popular, attractive and all the rest that is in any way in opposition to that which was at the first and needs to again be at the end.

Be with my mouth, Lord, speak to this congregation, but through them and beyond them out to many incomparable situations who need this word and we thank you and give you praise for it in Jesus name. Amen.

Learning to Read the Psalms Authentically

Well, there's one text that I can't get away from. It's like a jewel. I'm holding it up to the light and I see this glint and I turn it this way and there's another facet it's Psalm 102 and I'm not going to labor long in it.

But I wish I had about two hours, one hour for the Psalm itself and another hour for the commentary that the Lord has been stirring. But one of the advantages of hearing me is to learn how to read the Psalms.

You know that there's reading and reading. You know that there's faith and faith. You know that there's love and love. You know there's reality and reality. There's a shallow and an authentic. There's a seeming and appearing and an actual.

Maybe what ought to distinguish the church is its intense jealousy for the authentic. It's discontent with anything that appears to be but is not. It will not accept a closeness. It wants the real thing in itself.

And I feel probably with real justification that the church at large has been guilty of misreading the scriptures. We have brought our propensity to read Gone with the Wind into the Holy Writ. My mother is a terrible example of this but she's not a believer.

She's just an old Jewish lady who checks out eight romance novels a month from the local library in large print edition and gobbles them up, erotic and all, 95 years old. We Jews die hard. And so I give her a psalm to read.

I said, you got to read this. This is what the Lord has quickened. We've just come from the prayer time. The Lord took this out of my devotional time. I shared it. It was a blessing. Read this. And then she reads it and she reads past it, three, four, five psalms beyond it in about 15 minutes.

I said, something is grievously wrong with your reading. Well, if you'll read Psalm 102, the first part of it, the first 11 verses sounds like a man speaking from a concentration camp. It's a cry. Hear my prayer, O Lord, and hear, and let my cry come unto thee, hide not thy face from me in the day when I am in trouble, incline thy ear unto me in the day when I call, answer me speedily for my days are consumed like smoke and my bones are burned as in the hearth.

This is a cry of a man in absolute destitution, not unusual when I speak. The gods of technology hate my guts and I'm, and I'm not all that enthused over them either. When you hear this, don't think that this is an echo of the Nazi time.

You would be in a better place of reality to think of it as a time yet future. That there will be men crying out like this at a future time, coming to the same affliction under the same circumstances of attrition, devastation, and death in concentration camps prepared for annihilation.

That's not even polite to say on a Sunday morning, but it's true. Jews are slated and scheduled for another time of suffering. It's called the time of Jacob's trouble. And Jews will be crying out just like from this psalm, though without the faith of the psalmist.

For my days are consumed like smoke and my bones are burned as in a hearth. My heart is smitten and withered like grass so they forget to eat my bread. By reason of the voice of my groaning, my bones cleave to my skin.

I'm like a pelican of the wilderness. I'm like an owl of the desert. It's interesting that when I went to one of the concentration camps in Czechoslovakia, and I've been to them all over, Poland, wherever I can, Treblinka in Poland, Auschwitz, I've been to Dachau in Germany.

Every opportunity I go, if I'm in anywhere in proximity, I'll visit the concentration camps. And in this particular one, there was an owl emblazoned over the door that led into the ovens. I don't know what it is about owls, but if you have any in your house as decoration, think twice about it.

It's an ominous bird. You're much better off with doves. I'm like an owl of the desert. I watch them as a sparrow alone upon the housetop. My enemies reproach me all the day, and they that are mad against me are sworn against me.

They rage against me. So what do we understand from this? This is not a man in a momentary place of difficulty, but he's evidently under the dominion or authority and oppression of a continuous oppressor.

They're mad against me. They rage against me. They have me as an object of derision. I'm in some kind of confinement. I can't escape from this. They reproach me all the day. See how you have to read this?

You have to understand what's being implied, what's being sketched here in the poetry that a psalm is. Because of thine indignation and thy wrath, thou hast lifted me up and cast me down. My days are like a shadow and decline, and I am withered like grass.

Well, the remarkable thing about this statement is that the victim understands that he's not the object of some caprice or arbitrary condition, but that God himself is the author of his suffering. When Jewry, when Israel, when the church will understand the total sovereignty of God and accede to it, it will have come into the place of God's desire.

He's either the Lord over all or he's the Lord over nothing. And to dismiss our afflictions, our sufferings, our accidents, our broken marriages, our church conflicts, the issues of the world, the eruptions in Israel as somehow happenstance, chance, caprice, and not to understand that there's a Lord brooding over it all from the throne of heaven in complete sovereignty, waiting for the acknowledgment that he's God, will continue to suffer these afflictions.

So look at this, verse 10, because of thine indignation, somehow this victim has intuited that the degree of his suffering is the measure of his sin, that this is not happenstance. This is an exact proportionate thing that I deserve.

I'm out of kilter with God and have been for generations, like my father, so am I also. And you have been patient and forbearing and waiting for the acknowledgment of our iniquity, and it has not come.

Rather we have celebrated ourselves and see ourselves as virtuous and point to our malefactors as somehow being the cause of our problems. It's the other guy, and not recognizing that you're wanting an acknowledgment from us.

But thou, O Lord, because of thine indignation and thy wrath, what? You have a God who can get mad? I thought he was nice. I thought he was loving. This is a whole other perspective about God that we're going to find it difficult to reconcile with the sappy, saccharine sweet, sugary confection that we have created for our benefit and called it Jesus.

Those dum-dums last night at the university, and I'm trying to be polite, referring to the Islamic opposition that came, well we believe in God, don't you know that Allah means God? So therefore we have God, you have God.

You just have another name, we have another name. But it's God, oh yeah? Where's the evidence? You murderous, vicious culprit. Given the opportunity, you'd skin the flesh off my bones if you could. This supposed civility that you express is only the politic expedient of being on a campus.

If we were on the West Bank someplace, or in Gaza, I'd be a dead man before I could count ten. Don't give me this stuff. My God, your God, same God, we just call him Ali, you call him, I said you know what, there are those who call God Jesus, who have no more knowledge of God than you.

Merely putting an appellation and a title and a word upon something doesn't constitute the knowledge of God as God. It's when you know that you're suffering because of indignation and his wrath and his anger that you're getting warm.

What, we have the right to be indignant and God does not? We can get mad over some petty thing and God is imperturbable and some kind of distant and fuzzy, ambiguous deity? Hey, he's entitled to as much anger and indignation as you and has more reason for it.

He's mad at you. He's angry with the sinner every day. He's sick to the teeth of soppy Christendom and he's going to express it. And with his Jewish people and their flaky Judaism and social concern and ethical and moral sensibility, they're no better off and no more righteous than these Muslims themselves.

They deserve each other and they're getting each other. There's no man righteous, no, not one. If God could express his indignation and anger, we'd all go up like a puff. But I appreciate that this psalmist is interpreting his distress in the context of God.

Better to err, believing that, than you should err thinking it's only accident or it's the other guy or it's Hitler or it's the PLO or it's Arafat. Better to think first, it's the consequence of my own sin that God is judging even to bring my flesh as skin hanging on my bones and like a smoke and a vapor and I can't even eat is how far God will go to bring me to the truth about himself.

Because if I go into eternity in this foggy mishmash that I think is God that has served my purpose as Jesus, the errand boy who has brought me a boyfriend, girlfriend, health and prosperity, I'm in for a rude awakening.

Better to be awakened on this side of eternity than the other when there's no prospect for alteration at all. Those sappy Muslims that were there last night, I pleaded for their souls. I put it right into their teeth.

I gave them every opportunity to recognize truth and respond and call upon the name of the Lord. But no, at the end of the whole thing, they just wanted to be disputatious and represent their interests.

Poor saps. They'll agonize eternally for the missed opportunity, the misused occasion that came in the mercy and love of God. And I haven't come to my point yet. Verse 12 is the turning point of this psalm.

But thou, O Lord. Verse 11. My days are like a shadow that declines and I'm withered like grass. I'm a vapor. I'm here today. I'm gone tomorrow. What are my years? What a moment. But thou, O Lord. That's what God is waiting for.

But thou. Listen to this. I'm just going to review the personal pronouns employed by the psalmist until we get to verse 12. I've mocked them last night or early this morning in yellow mocking pen. My prayer, my cry.

I am in trouble. Turn the ear unto me. I call my days, my bones, my heart, my bread, my groaning, my bones. I am. I am like an owl. I watch. I am a sparrow. My enemies, me. They're sworn against me for I have eaten ashes.

I, I, I, me, me, me. I, I, I, me, me, me. But thou, O Lord. I thought you'd never get to it. You're drowning in personal pronouns as if you are the center of creation and the end all and the be all of all things.

You poor egocentric sap. But thou, O Lord, is the beginning of wisdom and righteousness and true living. Get away from that filthy false center of I, I, I, and me, me, me. And get to thou, O Lord. I'm a vapor, but thou, O Lord.

You endure forever and thy remembrance unto all generations. Thou shalt arise. Hallelujah. And have mercy upon Zion for the time to favor. Yes, the set time is come. For all of the harsh things I've said about Israel and the Jew, who knows them better than one who is.

They're not going to deliver themselves from the extremity into which they have fallen and which is the logic of their own godless life in attempting to establish a nation independent of its God and attempting to possess the land independent of his covenant.

They're getting into a trap that they, of which is their own making. They have rubbed their neighbors raw. They have had to trample upon the rights of others. The Lord has set this. What a trap that in coming out of the Holocaust, so desiring and needing and the world agreeing time for a homeland of their own.

But it's got to be carved out of a place where these Muslims and Arabs have had centuries of existence. How do you do that without jarring the sensibilities of those who have preceded you? Without infringing upon their rights, without appropriating their land, without exacerbating this Islamic Arab temper that doesn't take all that much to be made hateful, spiteful, vindictive and full of vengeance and will not be satisfied with a peace agreement.

It wants you out and it wants you out devastated and humiliated. That's its very nature. God could not have brought us Jews to a more intractable enemy than Islam. Then the Arab mindset and hatred, that Ishmaelic hatred of Isaac that is pervasive and enduring to the end.

See what you're going to do with this hotshot, with your logic, your reason and your inducements that if they put aside their vindictive intentions, we can share the prosperity of the Middle East together.

Come on, why don't you act in your own best self-interest? This is not going to do you nor us any good to have war and threat. Let's put down our arms and let's make this one of the most prosperous sections of the world.

We have the hi-fi, we've got the technique, we've got the mentality, we've got the wherewithal. You guys can really prosper if you put aside this vengeful desire for retribution and vengeance. Come on, this is in your own self-interest, don't you know that man lives by his enlightened self-interest?

He's rational, don't you know? No, they don't know. They're living by demonic power. And these Jews think that man lives by his rational best self-interest because that's what we would do. And so we would assume that's what they would do.

We do not understand man. Man is not rational. Men will die and be living bombs and go into Jerusalem marketplaces wired to explode so long as they can take down 20 and 30 Jews with them. They'll count it a privilege so to die and be blown to smithereens because there's a heaven up there with 70 virgins waiting to receive them.

These Jews don't know what man is because they don't know what they are because they don't know who God is. So if any help comes to this people, it will not be through anything that they can engineer.

They're showing their bankruptcy, their confidence in reason, logic, self-interest, arms, the arm of flesh, strength, the air force, the atomic arsenal. It will avail them nothing. They'll come a set time when their deliverance will come by God out of Zion because they've got to know that God is their savior.

Compassion for Israel as a Sign of the Spirit

They've got to know that they can't save themselves, that their self-sufficiency is a pitiful and inadequate substitute for the reality and power of God. But here's the key thing, saints. When has the set time come?

When is God going to arise and spring out and show himself and intervene and break the power of death and loose the captives and establish an Israel that is an Israel indeed? That will be a glory to his name that the representatives of all nations can come up every feast of tabernacles and pay homage to the God of Israel who has saved the nation out of death and established it and allowed it to prosper.

When is that going to take place? Because it's the consummation of history. It's the end of the age. And evidently Israel will have nothing to do with it herself. She's down and out. Her skin will cling to her bones.

Her flesh will be a smoke. It's when the set time to favor Zion has come. When is that time? When his servants shall have pity upon her stones and compassion upon her dust. Oh, I need another two hours at least.

Who are these servants? Servant sons. Not Israel. Israel is not in the servant posture. It cannot be until it's raised from the dead. It's in the self posture. I, I, me, me. To be a servant is to have broken the power of that egocentrism and know that your whole life is for another.

Him. Evidently, while Israel is in this distress, there are such a people in the earth who are servants and God is waiting for something in them to be released, to arise, to save and deliver Israel out of its vexation.

What, what is the set time? What is God waiting for? When my servants shall have compassion in her stones and pity on her dust. What do you mean? Are we the servants Lord to the church? Well, not the church as it presently is not the church in its great number because the church in its present condition is not in a servant posture.

Oh, it's interested in Israel. It might even make a trip and plant a tree and attend the feast of tabernacles conference and come back with giddy excitement and souvenirs. And that will affect nothing.

It's not sentiment that God is waiting for. That's flesh. He's waiting for the deepest spirit response of a kind that only God himself can make. For to have compassion on her stones and pity upon her dust is to have the response of God himself in his own compassionate heart and his own mercy for a people who have been reduced to stubble in judgment.

These stones and these, this dust is not the statement of archeology. It's the statement of judgment. Mark my words, saints, you're either hearing a false prophet or a true, but every present day modern city of Israel from Jerusalem to Haifa, to Tiberias, to Ashkelon, every city will be reduced to rubble and to ruin.

And the world will delight itself at that time and rub its hands in glee. They had it coming. They wouldn't negotiate. They're too, they were too stubborn. They allowed the world to be threatened by their intransigent, intractable attitudes.

They forced this crisis. They brought it upon themselves. They deserved it. Let him suffer. I'll tell you what, under the veneer of civility, that is the world. There's a palpitating thing waiting to break loose.

That is called hatred against the Jew. Don't think you're exempt. You don't even know your own heart. Wait till you're tested. Wait till the whole climate of opinion comes over these nations and this nation like a blanket.

Do you think that you're going to be the sore thumb, the standing out, that you'll not succumb, that you'll not be moved by the climate of opinion that prevails as it came over Germany in the Nazi time?

Where was the culture then? Where was Goethe and Fichte, Hegel and Schichte and Kant and Wagner and Mozart and music and culture and ethics and philosophy then? It went up like a puff as everyone came under the national hatred against the Jew.

It's resident in virtually every Gentile. What, haven't you gone to school with Jewish kids and watched them get straight A's without a bead of sweat while you break your head to pass? Don't tell me you're not envious.

And don't tell me if we have a national crisis of an economic collapse and Jews will be blamed for it because they're in the strategic economic positions. Who's the head of the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, Greenspan and Rubin and wherever you look these guys are proliferated in key economic places of control.

It's a Zionist conspiracy. It's a Jewish takeover. The Holocaust was a fraud calculated to give Israel the possession of the state. It doesn't take much to persuade the shallow and the disgruntled who can't get their gas for their Sunday driving and look for a simplistic answer to their predicament which Jews have always provided.

The only one who can be exempt from the hatred against the Jew that will billow out all over the world in every nation are the servant people of God. And while the world hates these Jews and they're not all that attractive, well, take a look.

This strange servant people will have a remarkable affinity for them. And it won't be schmaltzy sentimentality because they're cute. They're not going to be cute at this time. They're not going to be cute when they're in concentration camps or fleeing persecution and coming down your dirt streets in the back sections of Stillwater as refugees with tattered shirts on their backs and stinking and unbathed and not being fed and uprooted and disconcerted and wondering what hit us in the land that was our safety and our refuge and our place of prosperity suddenly and overnight and going to come to you in that condition.

Not at all grateful and believing that their predicament is because of Christianity. Because of the anti-Semitic references in the New Testament. Because the church has always been anti-Semitic. The Crusaders with the crosses and the tunics, that, that, that, that, that, that, that.

How are you going to respond? How are you going to receive them? Who will be disagreeable? We're tough when we're at our best. What about when we're at our worst? What a test for the church that has historically failed that test, where its greatest giants like Luther have failed it.

Chrysostom, the golden mouthed orator, the great apostolic giants of the, of the, uh, that have succeeded Paul were invariably anti-Semitic. But you're going to do better? What have you got that they don't have?

You're going to do better than Luther? You better. And that brings me to my subject. The subject is the spirit of God as the expression of the resurrection life of the resurrected and ascended King. To receive that spirit that raised Jesus from the dead is not merely to receive a charismatic charge that's going to give a little, little, little to our services and an adornment to our denominations.

To receive the spirit of Christ is not only to receive enablement. It's to receive character. It's to receive the essence. The spirit is the essence of something. What is the essence of God? What, what are the quintessential, uh, derivatives?

What, what is he made of? What, what is his awesome reality? It's compassion. It's love. It's mercy. Not, not this sappy, uh, bear hug stuff, love. The love that can bear with the unattractive and the unlovable.

It's a love that not only clucks its tongue, that poor Israel has had to suffer the devastation of her cities, but identifies with that nation and embraces their suffering and is one with them in their affliction.

This is more than sentimental condescension. This is nothing less than being of the same stature and kind and temper as very God himself. And what will we do to obtain that? We'd have to have a war on against the flesh in all of its variable forms, however attractive.

War Against the Flesh and False Worship

Hey, I could hardly keep my feet from dancing this morning. I wanted to be a dancer once upon a time, about 30 or 40 pounds ago. And I still have a little vestige left that certain kinds of music can get me going.

You know what I have to do? I have to avoid that kind of music. I have to avoid reading Tom Wolfe, Thomas Wolfe, the great novelist from South Carolina that I stumbled upon and as an adolescent reading adventure books, Raphael Sabatini, The Seahawk, and I came across a book in the library called Of Time and the River.

I thought it was an adventure story. And once I opened its covers and began to drink from its content, I was a goner. The depth of that man, the power of his writing, the intensity of his search and quest, this man who is staggering in the world trying to find his way and understanding.

I read everything that Thomas Wolfe has ever written and it's on my bookshelf now and I have not opened it since I've been a believer. I'm afraid to. I don't dare allow myself because my soul and my flesh will be quickly stirred to embrace and to be moved away from the realm of spirit.

Most of us are in such a condition that we can't even discern the one from the other. If our feet get to tapping and we can do that in the name of the Lord and have a lyric that goes with it that seems to celebrate him, we think we are in the spirit.

I'd be much more persuaded if we pulled the plug out of the amplifiers and the overhead projector and had no instrumentation at all and sat there like a bunch of dummies without a worship leader. And if we are worshipers and have reason to worship because of the great grace that has come to us daily and last night at the university and wheresoever, something will well up.

Something will break forth, cracked, off key, out of tune, but heavenly. It'll be in the spirit. Listen to this German theologian whom I have avoided for the longest time, Albert Schweitzer, because I accepted the misrepresentations about him not having read him myself.

Praise God that Reggie bought the book and brought it with him because he's not going to get it back. That's the kind of guy I am. That's the kind of guy I'd like you to be. That when I was in Germany years ago, sitting in the study of an American chaplain whose wife was German and her mother was sewing up my torn pants, I'm sitting in my BVDs, feeling the cool draft and looking at the book shelves.

What else is there to look at? It's the first thing when I come into a person's home is I want to see what they're reading. What's in their bookshelves tells me more about them than any other single thing.

And I'm looking over these titles and all of a sudden my eye falls on one title. When I saw that title, I resolved in myself, I'm not leaving this place without that book. If I have to step over that man, if I have to ram and batter, I'm not leaving.

You say, what was the title, Art? The Crucified God by Jürgen Moltmann, a man who came out of World War II from Russian prisons as a defeated German soldier and studied theology. And he said, no theology would be acceptable to us who have suffered the Siberian blasts and the Arctic winters and the Russian vehemence against us and their camps, except a theology predicated on the cross.

The Crucified God? I knew that Jesus was crucified. But did I understand who he was and is in that crucifixion? That is God suffering on that cross. I left with that book. No one would dare stop me. I since made it up to him, of course.

Now Schweitzer says, the possession of the spirit proves to believers that they are already removed out of the natural state of existence and transferred into the supernatural. Oh, dear saints, we have at least another hour left.

I was sitting in a fellowship in Denmark, my wife's country, the creature comfort country. The world can be coming to an end. They'll still have coffee at four o 'clock. They'll still have the raisin bread and this cake glazed with chocolate.

And they have the same curtains and creature comfort. It was my wilderness time. And I'm in the service. I'm going to be the speaker. I have no message, of course. I'm sitting, waiting. And the people are coming in.

I'm looking at them in a strange way. And my first words when I got up to speak was. Why are you mere men? Why are you mere men? I was struck as you were coming into that church and taking your seats that you're only mere men.

You're only natural men. Something's wrong. You're mere men. You're natural. You've just come to associate for the benefit of a service. But where is the transcendence? Where is the heavenly? First, the earthly, then the heavenly.

First, the natural, then the spiritual. But haven't, isn't it time for the heavenly and for the spiritual? Why are you yet mere men? Why do you think like mere men and act like mere men and look like mere men?

Where is your angelic countenance? Where's the radiance of the Lord? Where's the transcendent quality with which you should be infused and demonstrate, not just on Sunday, but when any demand be made upon you and you oppress the squish issues in God.

My dear sister was concerned for me this morning. Aren't you tired out? Not at all. Why should I be tired when it's the Father who doeth the works? So I was up at between two and five and my sleep is sporadic.

And the first days here in Stillwater, there was no sleep at all. So I'm in the third day of affairs. So what? My Lord, I can leap over hedges and overcome troops in the strength that I feel and out of which I'm speaking this morning, which is God.

I'm not boasting in myself, saints, but we prophetic men are called not to proclaim, but to demonstrate the thing in itself. What is apostolic? What is prophetic? And if we don't know that, let's shut up the building and go home.

That's the foundations of the church. It's the thing in itself. Paul had a citizenship in heaven. Jesus said to Nicodemus, no man ascends who has not first come down. Even the son of man who is in heaven.

Well, there's the son of man talking to Nicodemus in Jerusalem. How can he be in heaven? Because that's how he was talking to Nicodemus. From the heavenly vantage point, he wasn't answering that man's questions in an earthly natural way.

Step one, step two, step three, how to get saved. But he spoke in mysteries. You must be born again of the spirit. What? Must I through a second time go through my mother's womb? You dumb, dumb. If I'm speaking to you, earthly things, how will you understand heavenly?

And you're a, you're a leader in Israel. You don't, you don't know step one. Jesus didn't answer him from the earthly human religious plane. He answered him from the heavenly plane and left the man completely bewildered for the heavenly will always offend the earthly and jar it.

The Spirit’s Humble Witness

But there's more hope for a man jarred from heaven and left in perplexity by heavenly response. Then there is a man being told step ones, how to get saved brother. Praise God that those who encountered me in my crisis 36 years ago as a disarray Jew, whose ideologies and philosophies have failed, spoke to me from heaven.

That German man that picked me up off the side of the road with a brand new car. And as I had stood three hours in the rain, a soggy mess, angry and stopped for me as cars whizzed by and people just somehow didn't notice my existence.

He stopped and didn't just give me the wave. Like, come on, I'm doing your favor. He got out of the car and greeted me as if I was doing him the favor after this guy's got to be a homo. I may be wet, but I'm still attractive.

Far from it. He was an angel from heaven and he put me on the front seat and threw my rucksack on the back seat and messed up his impulse upholstery and didn't even notice what manner of men is this. And off we drove and he turned, he looked at me.

I'm a man 34 years old. It's past the tourist season. I'm not a kid out on a lock. He said to me in German, why are you traveling like this? And so well as I could, I tried to explain. I said, look, I'm a modern man.

If any man is modern, it's us Jews. We are modernity itself. We have shaped this world. We have given it. It's Karl Marx's and it's Sigmund Freud's and it's Albert, it's Einstein's. We have made this world.

We have given you the movie makers and the Charlie Chaplins who is Jewish and Steven Spielberg and the writers and Eric Fromm and you name it, culture heroes. We're small, but influential. We have shaped this modern world and it's a disaster and I'm suffering.

That catastrophe. I'm a living piece of a man, broken, modern man, broken at his foundations, looking for the answers to life, thinking that they must be philosophical. What else is there? The man insisted that we stop.

Well, I said to him and I said, and I'm also Jewish. I said, cats, you dope. What does he have to know that for? That'll turn him off, surely. And I looked cautiously to see his face drop and the man was just pouring out light.

He was excited. It was like someone had flipped the switch. The neon light went on to learn that I was a Jew. He's excited about me being a Jew. I've been one for 34 years. I was never excited. What's he excited about?

Does it mean something to him that it doesn't mean to me? For me, it was a perplexity growing up in Brooklyn, New York and asphalt and bricks and wondering how I'm related to some nomadic people back there in the, in the desert areas of the Middle East.

What does that mean? Forced fed and compelled to go to Hebrew school and, and recite a bar mitzvah that my mother can cry a few crocodile tears and feel like she's done her Jewish duty. What does it mean?

Evidently meant something to him. He insisted we stop for refreshments at his expense. And what a conversation. Oh my God. I remember it to this day, 36 years later, golden conversation. What did he say?

He didn't say all that much, but what a listener, how he drew my heart out, how I shared with him what I'd never shared with closest friends, my ex-wife, anyone, intellectual colleagues, the anguish and frustration of my Jewish life.

The sense of the peril of the world, the moral collapse, the coming atomic catastrophe. There's no answer. And finally, I, everything was out of me. I just, I was limp. Look, glib, itsy bitsy John 3, 16 quotations, but to provoke the questions, what must I do to be saved?