t'! 16 Friday, February 21, 1986 THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS FICTION Raizel Kaidish Continued from preceding page ADAT SHALOM SYNAGOGUE AND THE DETROIT FRIENDS OF BAR-ILAN UNIVERSITY cordially invite you to meet and hear DR. CHARLES LIEBMAN Department of Political Studies Bar-Ilan University Co-Author of Civil Religion in Israel who will speak on: CAN WE HAVE BOTH JUDAISM AND pru MrP MI T!C JCW1W1 aitAlt.f Monday, February 24. 1986, 8:00 p.m at Adat Shalom Synagogue 29901 Middlebelt Road/Farmington Hills . You are invited at no charge and refreshments will follow the program There will be no solicitation of funds. Sandra & Jonathan Jaffa Howard Tapper Co-Chairmen Adult Study Commission Adat Shalom Synagogue Chairman, Education Committee Detroit Friends of Bar-Ilan University . RSVP 398-7180 or 851-5100 their arms. But it was something else that infuriated me. There is, of course, nothing unusual in a child's resentment of a moth- er. My friends, from early adolescence on- ward, were always annoyed with one or another of their parents. But theirs was the pure clean indignation which is un- ashamed of itself. Mine was an anger also angry at itself. Hadn't she suffered enough? Shouldn't I try to do everything to make it up to her? By hating her I joined the ranks of her enemies. I allied myself with the murderers. And so the resentment, folded back on itself again and again, thickened and dark- ened. Never once did I ever say, not even to myself, "I am angry at this woman." This acknowledgement came years later, after she was dead, during the time in which I deliberated over having a child of my own. (The mental delivery of this deci- sion was so much more painful than the ac- tual physical delivery.) In debating the reasons for having a child, I asked myself whether any reasons could be right, wheth- er one was ever justified in bringing a per- son into being for some reason of one's own? But if not for one's own reason, then whose? It seemed a moral inconsistency woven into the very fabric of human existence. And then I realized that the act of parent- ing need not bear any of this moral com- promise: it is possible for the reason one had for creating a child to recede into sig- nificance in the face of the fact of that child's existence. The ends for which one bore the child lose themselves in the know- ledge of the child itself. This is the essence of good parenting, and it was exactly what I felt to be missing from the relationship between my mother and me. I knew what , no child should ever know; that my mother had had me for some definite reason and that she would always see me in terms of this reason. I sensed this in my mother, and I hated her for it. I said that my anger never A wvc inter e u mon whose forth:Was so UypicaI 'of the oddity of my family that now, years later, even I can see its comic aspects and smile My first sem- ester of college, while my friends devel- oped their own conventional modes of re- bellion, I worked out mine. I became a positivist. I took Introduction to Philo- sophy with a self-intoxicated young pro- fessor, a new Ph.D. from Harvard, and, although this Would not be his own de- scription, a neo-positivist. He told us dur- ing the first lecture that he was going to show us, over the course of the semester, why we were lucky, insofar as we were philosophy students, to have been born now; that it was now possible to see that previous generations had devoted them- selves to pseudo-questions concerning the nature of Reality, Truth, and The Good; and that such questions were expressions of logical confusion. These fine big words don't name anything, and thus there is nothing there whose nature is to be explored. - I sat there drinking in his words, think- ing, "This is it. This is why I came to col- lege." All through that term, Monday Wednesday, and Friday, from ten to ele- - ven, while others dozed and doodled, I listened in a state of delirium, following the arguments with a concentration I have never attained since. My mind bubbled over with the excitement of this illicit doctrine, this forbidden philosophy. And the most forbidden, and therefore delici- ous, view offered in the course was that devoted to ethics, or rather the dismissal of ethics. I memorized Whole passages out of my favorite book, A.J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic: "We can now see why it is impossible to find a criterion for deter- mining the validity of ethical judgements. It is not because they have an 'absolute' validity which is mysteriously indepen- dent of ordinary sense-experience, but because they have no objective validity whatsoever. If a sentence makes no state- ment at all, there is obviously no sense, in asking whether what it says is true or false. And we have seen that sentences which simply express moral judgements do not say anything. They are pure expres- sions of feeling and as such do not come under the category of truth and false- hood." I was moved by the sparse bpauty and elegance of the arguments. How had I never seen it before, never seen that my mother's unshakable theory was nothing but a floating airy fabrication of pseudo- statements? My preparations for final exams were trivial compared to my cramming for the visit home during intercession. I arrived back about eleven at night, too late for philosophical debate. But my mind was so teeming with positivist arguments that when my mother undu wished Ine.`:a^-^1 `" - 'Inrnat o :-"L you eugea- mean by that? What do you mean by `good'?" The next evening, after my Mother and father arrived home from the hospital, we all sat in'the living room while Bertha, our house-keeper, finished dinner., I was waiting for the right moment for launching my attack, any comment which was mildly speculative. But my perverse mother was all practicality that night. She asked me about the food at' school, about my room? mate, even told a'funny story about her own roommate, in Berlin before the war. Then finally: - "You were always so brief on the phone when I asked you about yotu?classes. Tell me more about them. You seemed to have enjoyed them' very much." "Yes, they were wonderful. Especially philosophy. I'm .going to major in it." "Really? I've always thought it a rather funny kind of prOfession, Every person