THERE BUT FOR FORTUNE

Contingencies of time and place ensure that there will be distances between us.

I live alone in the suburbs. As such, I exemplify the cliché of someone who does not know his neighbors. Indeed, for the most part I don't, and my solitariness in my widowed state at times induces feelings of isolation. The pandemic has intensified these feelings as it has for almost all of us.

This happily changed somewhat several months ago when I got to know a young couple who live on my street. They are parents of twins, fraternal twins just a year old, a little girl and a boy. Sometimes they visit, and it is always a delight, like a sunbeam that pierces the gray clouds on an otherwise dreary day. Each visit is far enough apart so I can observe them grow through what seem like identifiable stages.

To be in the presence of babies comes as close to pure joy as one can experience (though admittedly I possess the privilege of not bearing any custodial responsibilities). The Buddha bids us to cultivate the ability to receive joy from the joy of others, and few things deliver on that experience in a more unqualified fashion than sharing time with very young children. Perhaps it is because we sense that we come as close as possible to the very life force which animates existence, our own included.

The poet Khalil Gibran notes this in The Prophet,wherein he wrote about children in a verse inflected with the poignancy of separation that is characteristic of his thought. It goes as follows:

“Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

    They come through you but not from you,

    And though they are with you yet they belong not to you”...

“You may give them your love but not your thoughts,

    For they have their own thoughts.

    You may house their bodies but not their souls,

    For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

    You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.

    For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.”

Joy, yes, in the moment, but I worry about my friends' children as I am concerned for the future more generally. I need not rehearse the existential challenges we face – climate destruction and more immediately the looming apprehension that the American democratic experiment may soon come to an end. As I write this, full-scale, aggressive war has broken out in Ukraine. It is a reality that re-invokes the horrid events on the European continent of 80 years ago and associations with the darkest moments in human history. The reality feels ominous and unnerving. I will return to this later.

Some parents today, given the potentially cataclysmic challenges we face, ask whether they should choose to bring children into the world. This discussion is not new. When I was young we pondered the same question. Then the threats included the annihilation of humanity via thermonuclear war and fear of overpopulation. With the end of the Cold War, the former has been greatly reduced (but by no means eliminated as the current war has evoked) and the latter seems not to be nearly as pressing a reality as the alarmists then predicted.

But in answer to that question, as Khalil Gibran asserts, the future belongs to our children and to future generations. It does not belong to us. We will not be there to protect them. Therefore, the only refuge we can seek to quell our apprehensions is the hope, a hope not as firmly grounded as we would want, that our children will possess the resources to successfully cope with the world and its challenges that confront them. We need to do the best we can to launch them well, but this is all we can do.

These uncertainties, the contingencies of human existence and an unknown future, inform my feelings about the diverse experiences that fate imposes on us merely issuing from the happenstance of where we were born. I look from a safe distance at the war that is rapidly unfolding in Ukraine.

Just a few days ago, people there were living their normal lives. They went to work, walked the streets, did their shopping, they chatted with friends over a latte in a cafe. Today bombs are falling and they are fleeing for their lives in fear and terror. They shelter in their basements, in subway stations, and they leave with meager possessions heading to the west in the hope of finding relative safety. Or, they cross the border into Poland, Moldova, or Romania and become refugees. Sturdy buildings will be bombed to rubble, infrastructure and the services that enable normal life will be destroyed. Scarcity will become normal. Secure lives are being upended by fear and chaos. They are people just as I am a person, and we greatly share common aspirations and needs. But through no fault of their own, they have been consigned a very different and horrifying fate.

Twenty years ago, I founded a non-profit organization to assist people living in my area who were seeking political asylum in the United States. There are many programs that assist asylum seekers, but ours was distinctive in that we found families who would take our clients into their homes. All of our clients had experienced persecution in their home countries from which they fled. Almost all were survivors of torture.

Eleven years ago, my wife and I opened our home to a Syrian family: a young couple and their adorable one-year-old daughter. They arrived in the United States just before the civil war broke out in Syria. The husband had been surveilled and then arrested by the Syrian intelligence services for securing life-saving heart surgery for his daughter in the United States. The operation was provided by a humanitarian organization in Texas. He was arrested on the grounds that anyone who would accept such an expensive gift from an enemy country must have done so in exchange for military secrets. Little difference that he had never served in the military. While imprisoned, he was brutally tortured.

During his stay with us, he was able to win his asylum claim. He was defended by four pro bono attorneys, all young women, who worked extraordinarily hard to save this man's life. They certainly gave the legal profession a good name. Our client's case was so compelling and so well presented that the prosecutor from the Department of Homeland Security refrained from asking a single question.

Before his hearing in immigration court, our client asked if I would read his deposition. I agreed, and I regret that I did. Included was a detailed description of his torture. It was truly gruesome; by no means torture light. Though it is more than a decade in the past, I can't expunge those images from my mind.

As he lived in our home, we often engaged in conversation. I sat here and sitting opposite me was a man who had undergone the ineffable experience of torture. I was conscious of the reality that there was a gulf between him and me that could not be bridged. Torture is a phenomenon so exceptionally violative that it is morally in a category by itself. The tortured occupy a realm, viscerally and without escape, that the non-tortured cannot comprehend, however sympathetic we may be. As such, it separates those men, women, and children, who have been tortured from the rest of us who live safe and comfortable lives. As we got to know each other better, conversed with one another, shared meals together, and laughed with each other, our common humanity became increasingly apparent and appreciated. But because of the unique and unspeakable horrors he had undergone, I am aware that there is an experiential divide that will always separate us.

So too it must be for those who now have the normalcy of their lives stripped away and their security pulled out from under them by the destructiveness and inhumanity of war. It is something I can only witness in safety from far away.

How much do the contingencies of time, place, and happenstance determine our fate? My father was born in Ukraine and spent his childhood there. The czar ruled, and as a child, he experienced the terror of pogroms in his village. He didn't speak much of his past but he described it as the worst of times. He was able to leave and eventually make his way to Cuba and 20 years later, after the Second World War, he migrated to the United States. I was born two years later and had the good fortune to live a middle-class life. My father and I, as children, experienced very different worlds. My mother's parents came from eastern Poland around the turn of the last century. They left, but their brothers and sisters did not. Their lives ended in Hitler's gas chambers. I owe my existence to certain choices. It could have been otherwise.

Since the terrorist attacks on 9/11, Americans have lost a sense of security that two oceans have long provided us. But the truth is, we have not known the disruption and pain of war on our own soil. When I travel to Europe, I sense that people today, generations after World War II, still live with the felt recognition that the War and the Holocaust happened on their territory, in their neighborhoods. It is part of their countries' and their families' history. For Europeans it is a factor of their collective memory. With the Soviet-induced famine of the 1930s and the slaughter of World War II, Ukraine has arguably suffered more violence than any nation on earth. It was the center of what historian, Timothy Snyder, has referred to as the “bloodlands,” suffering from both Hitler's and Stalin's' tyranny.

Despite 9/11, and despite the ominous challenges America faces at this time, I continue to live in a safe and rich country. I live an uninterrupted middle-class life. In this sense, I differ from those who have experienced war, violence, and torture. In a world grown smaller, wherein the electronic media allow me to be an observer of the plight of others in total safety, I am increasingly aware of that difference, the experiential gap that divides us, and it brings with it a distinctive kind of disquiet.

As noted, I am very much alone. But in the ulterior layers of my character, by virtue of philosophy and emotion, I am a social person. I am a communitarian with a sense of my connection to the human family, those who are proximate and the stranger alike. With empathy, I am moved by the pain of others. And so I look from a secure distance at those whose lives have been thrust into chaos and fear in Ukraine. As an internationalist, I am not oblivious of the suffering war has brought to the people of Yemen, Afghanistan, and central Africa also.

All this brings to mind the radical contingency, the tentativeness of the human condition, the ineluctable reality that we are all vulnerable to a fate, in its most dire aspects, not of our own making. And so I will do what I can. I will protest, sign petitions, give money, and write essays. I will also use my very limited powers to strive to make the world a better, more secure, place for tomorrow's children, recognizing ruefully, as I do, that it can never be enough.