I Am The Villain Of This Story
My repentance as Yom Kippur draws near
I was conversationally captured at a recent dinner party by a world class chatterbox. She seemed desperate to impress me with her life, expressed through her children’s educational feats and her husband’s professional resume.
At rare pauses in her soliloquy, I tried to turn the conversation to topics of a wider scope. I failed, and a good part of my attention was free to study the woman and try to understand her motivations.
She was rather small in stature and despite her dominance of the conversation, she leaned back, not forward, the language of her body reticent, hesitant, shy. Her voice was not an instrument pleasant to listen to. Neither quick nor sharp, but sing-song with a squeaky tone.
It seemed she had risen in the world and felt that my knowing her family’s successes were necessary to contradict evidence of more humble beginnings. As well, I thought this dinner party made her nervous. She was striving for acceptance and feared silence as a form of dinner party failure and rejection.
There was nothing mean-spirited about what the woman was saying. Pride in one’s family is an admirable trait. And as someone who felt completely comfortable at the dinner, I should have taken her patter in stride and made the woman feel encouraged and accepted.
I was good for a while. Or perhaps I wasn’t. I’m sure my expression was blank, perhaps pitiless, maybe even a hint of annoyance in my eyes although I’m quite sure I didn’t curl my lip in a sneer as that’s not within the typical range of my facial repertoire.
Over the main course, the woman asked me what I did. I told her I write a newsletter.
“Oh. My. God,” she shrieked.
She too was a writer of a blog.
There are some people who find in every coincidence, no matter how likely or ordinary, the workings of some mysterious and ineffable force. Apparently she was one of them.
She invited me to submit an entry from my newsletter to her blog, provided that my submission was “something that intelligent people would like to read.”
Now I know she didn’t intend this as an insult. She was attempting to be generous. Yet I was annoyed, and as she spoke about her blog, devoted to local happenings, the phrase “something that intelligent people would like to read” was echoing in my mind.
Jewish sages declare that every person has both a good and an evil inclination engaged in constant battle. The woman had sparked my evil inclination.
Having found out that we were both writers, she told me she had recently visited The Mount, the home of Edith Wharton, now a museum. Had I been? No, but Edith Wharton was one of my favorite authors.
Another shriek-worthy coincidence. She, too, considered Wharton among her favorites and had “read all her books.”
Up until then I hadn’t questioned any of her assertions. But it’s rare to find someone outside the literary world who actually reads the “classics.” As well, she quickly turned the conversation away from “the books” to platitudes about the beauty of the Mount.
I sensed she had overplayed her hand.
This was the moment of my moral failure. Here was a woman I had judged to be vulnerable and ill at ease. Perhaps there was an undercurrent of class differences between the two of us running through her mind. It’s not only in England that a manner of speaking can tell a specific tale of upbringing and geography.
I should have continued my passive dumbshow. I had nothing to prove.
Instead, I pressed her and asked which was her favorite Wharton novel.
She was flustered, at a loss to name a title. Desperate, she said her favorite was the one set in the Berkshires. She said this with the tell-tale uplift at the end of her sentence that turns a statement into a question.
It was a good guess, but instead of naming Ethan Frome for her, I pretended not to know and asked whether she remembered what the novel was about. She did not.
I had scored my cheap, smug “victory.” 1
Noblesse oblige properly understood
The concept of noblesse oblige can be summed up as “to whom much is given, much is demanded.” The material aspect of noblesse oblige is easy. I wrote about that in my post A Checkbook Does Not Make You A Hero.
But the more challenging and no less important aspect of noblesse oblige is not to abuse an elevated position in the social world, whether based on birth, wealth, education, beauty or any other advantage that’s been parceled out unequally.
I consider myself to be a “nice bloke” as one of my British commenters called me. And most of the time I think I am. But I wasn't nice in my encounter with the well-meaning chatterbox. I knew full well I was doing something wrong and I did it anyway.
My explanation for my bad behavior––not an excuse–– is that at times I revert to a now obsolete view of myself as the boy whose only defense against the popular, powerful, and self-confident was to use his brain as a weapon. But that boy is gone and I have to see myself now as others see me.
When I give in to my evil inclination in this regard, the damage is double- edged in that it injures me, the attacker, as much as it injures the attacked. It’s a corruption of noblesse oblige. It cuts against my desire to be kind. It lowers my self-esteem. And simply put, it’s a bad look.
When we think deeply or write about our bad behavior and the distress it causes us, we don’t erase either the behavior or the distress. But by explaining it to ourselves we change its nature. It’s like entering a room strewn with clothes and toys and putting the items away in their proper place. We haven’t changed the objects but we’ve changed how we access them. 2
And that seems to me the essence and value of a true self-reckoning.
In dark woods
In the Jewish calendar, we’re in the midst of the Days of Awe. The two-day Jewish New Year of Rosh Hashanah ended at sundown yesterday (Friday).3 We now await Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, that begins at sundown this coming Friday.
The moral purpose of these days is to scour your behavior to look for ways that your evil inclination has taken hold.
The traditional belief is that on Rosh Hashanah god decides who shall live and who shall die.4 But god’s decision is not final until Yom Kippur ends.
It is during these Days of Awe that you can appeal god’s decision through atonement, culminating in the prayers of repentance in the Yom Kippur liturgy.5 To make sure that Yom Kippur is observed with appropriate solemnity, the Torah mandates that you must afflict yourself. That affliction has meant refraining from eating or drinking from one sundown to the next.
Jewish New Year’s resolutions are meant to be far more serious than joining a gym. The opening lines of Dante’s Inferno express it well:
“Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself
In dark woods, the right road lost. To tell
About those woods is hard––so tangled and rough.” 6
By definition, all of us are always somewhere in the middle of our life. If we contemplate our spiritual condition with real rigor, few of us can say that we have never turned away from the “right road” and found ourselves spiritually entangled. 7
Certainly this essay proves beyond a reasonable doubt that I cannot.
The fictional master of attacking someone’s vulnerabilities is Hannibal Lector from Silence Of The Lambs. The clip below shows him tormenting Agent Starling.
For Jane Austen fans, note that my behavior in this instance is reminiscent of Emma’s cutting remark at the picnic to the well-meaning chatterbox Miss Bates. A rudeness for which Emma is rightfully reprimanded by Mr. Knightley. I note that Emma at twenty-one is still in her formative years and open to reformation while I am sixty-two and many decades past the age I can claim youthful indiscretion.
This thought came to me while reading, thinking, and commenting on a post by one of my favorite Substack writers
who writes with great authenticity and compelling pace about her romantic life.Rosh Hashanah is observed for two days because the Jewish calendar is lunar and in earlier times the religious authorities had issues with precisely marking the beginning of the month as well as disseminating that information to distant Jewish populations.
Below is part of the traditional prayer. As a boy, dragged to services, I used to try to amuse myself by imagining the different ways of death listed and put them in order of least to most desirable. Death by drowning seemed the easiest, although death by beast could be quick as well.
“On Rosh Hashanah will be inscribed and on Yom Kippur will be sealed – how many will pass from the earth and how many will be created; who will live and who will die; who will die at his time and who before his time; who by water and who by fire, who by sword and who by beast, who by famine and who by thirst, who by upheaval and who by plague, who by strangling and who by stoning."
On Yom Kippur you are only asked to atone to god. No need to wait for the holiday to apologize to mere mortals.
From the 1994 translation by Robert Pinsky.
As Adam Sandler might sing, “Dante Alighieri, not a Jew; but I bet his translator is.”
A Hebrew word for repentance is T’Shuvah, translated as return or turning back to the proper path. Since no one is perfect, this turning is ever-present, ideally in a rising circular motion, the opposite direction from the deeper and deeper concentric circles of hell imagined by Dante in The Inferno.
I always cringe at that scene in Emma. You’re not all bad, dad! You have your merits.
Through this painfully astute piece, I experienced both your tablemate’s desperate need for acceptance and your own disdainful irritation. I have lived your side of this drama but not hers. By suggesting that you write something suitably “intelligent” for her blog, I think she was not so much trying to be generous as casting about for a friend. Your position in the world must have made you a particularly attractive target, but I suspect she is lonely as well as clueless. Her conversational gambit shows she has no idea what meaningful connection really is. I feel for this woman even though I’d treat her no better than you did.