The Secret Knowledge

“Build me a Son, Lord,” it ran, “who will be strong enough to know when he is weak, and brave enough to face himself when he is afraid,” et cetera, closing, after the conclusion of the recipe, with, “And then I, his father, may dare to whisper ‘I have not lived in vain.’ ”

I remember thinking, aged eight, that this was hot stuff.

I came across the poem after fifty-some years, in William Manchester’s biography of MacArthur, American Caesar, and found, reading the first few words, that I could quote the whole from memory. So I suppose it had made an impression.

But, on reflection, it’s a poem not about the General’s relationship to his son, but about his relationship with God. It is a direction to God from his superior, General MacArthur. Perhaps if the General wanted such a son (as I am sure he did) he might have taken a hand in the process himself, asking God for guidance rather than for expedited delivery.

Much later I discovered Kipling’s “If,” a note not from a man to God, but from a man to his son.

As an American I was spared this poem’s ruination by its, to the British, outrageous ubiquity, it holding a place in the British literary consciousness like that held over here by The Great Gatsby and Moby-Dick but not, unfortunately, by “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”⁵⁸

I found Kipling’s sentiments marvelous, an exhortation to his son to be strong and brave, careful and considerate.⁵⁹ This is advice I give my own son, my profound desire for its reception colored by my knowledge of my own shortcomings.

Like that speech by Polonius, it is the plea of every father watching his son leave home: “Forgive me, I’ve done everything wrong, I have done nothing right. I was, as a model, insufficient, and as a preceptor, hypocritical. Here is what I wish to have said: Our time is almost done, and I have taxed you with my pomposity and garrulousness and officiousness, and you have been supremely patient with me. But perhaps you might listen for just this last time, in the hope that these words might aid you.”

I have learned from my old German friend Ilse various helpful old-world phrases. One is: “Boys are different.”

And, indeed, they are. Very like each other, and very different from girls.

After three daughters, a son is a revelation. Watching him and his friends one both sees and remembers, boys want only to explore, to fight, to test, to climb, break and rearrange everything they see. They will find a way to ruin a featureless, titanium chamber.

Our American school system (public and private) is against them. It is no wonder the boys have developed or been diagnosed (which is to say marginalized) as possessing a whole alphabet full of acronyms, which may be reduced to “I give up, drug them.”

But here is a truer view of boys, from Tolstoy.

He described Karenin’s impatience with his young son Sergei. Sergei is looking out of the window, and Karenin is trying to get him to describe, “a verb of action.” But Sergei, we are told, is patiently trying to remove his attention from the progress of a butterfly, and his ruminations about the nature of air, sun, and the world, in general. Sergei is trying to be polite to his father, and his father is berating him as a dunce, but the boy was wondering at the nature of the Universe.

A blunter writer might conflate our school’s anti-male bias with a societal inclination to cease exploration and production, and let the land revert to fallowness. We seem to be taxing ourselves to death in an effort to arrive at a magical formula which will allow us to survive without either production or exploration.

Traditionally women dealt with the home and men dealt with the World. Men and women are both parents, but only one of them is created to be a mother. That there is no difference can be asserted only by those who have not raised children.

Boys are born to contest with the world, and if we are going to breed out of them that ability, the land is going to lie fallow.

The other aspect of our Jewish Chicago Summer was Oakton Manor. This was our marvelous, knotty-pine equivalent to the Catskills, just over the Wisconsin Line. Here the kids had activities every day under the supervision of counselors, while the wives got a break from motherhood. The men came up on the weekends, and the adults smoked, drank, danced, and were entertained. Do such resorts exist anymore? It was a Jewish Haven, both catering to the human preference for recreation in the midst of one’s kind, and redressing the contemporary exclusion of Jews (Restriction) from many hotels and resorts.

Our lives today seem more stratified, or contained, by wealth than race. This is, thermodynamically, a shame, for one needs more energy to relax sequestered by wealth, than protected in simple settings by one’s clan; for wealth, as opposed to race, certainly has degrees, and so these differences, even in seclusion, may create envy and anxiety.

Being among my people is a delight.

Jews associate exclusively with Jews. Though we may identify the momentary agglomeration as based on wealth, politics, location, profession, or avocation, a quick check will reveal the group (even if made of enemies of Israel, or of the Jewish Religion itself) is made of Jews. We Jews live among ourselves. I love it. And all the carping about Israel, or mooing about the Palestinians, or about the emptiness of Religion, is a constant in Jewish life, and is, in fact, the descant of the Torah.

The Jewish proclamation of disaffection is like the constant head and body movements of the blind called “blindisms.” The blind use these to locate themselves in space.

Our Jewish bitching is, similarly, a proprioceptive maneuver, used to locate in space our wandering, border culture.

Many Jews are confused about or opposed to the existence of the Jewish State, and, in their ignorance or muddleheadedness, wish it away. Much of this disaffection is laziness, for if Israel were gone, these anti-Zionist souls believe they might dwell in an unmitigated state of assimilation, any pressures of which might conceivably be combated by an effortless supineness.⁶⁰

We were strangers in a strange land, and we are still strangers in a strange land—but the land is less strange than any in which we have dwelt. How to make it less strange still? To cease pretending and enjoy the benefits of liberty, security, and success, and defend them as an American, rather than posing as a “citizen of the World.”

For here the assimilated (Liberal) Jew simply expands the neurosis of Diaspora thinking: the United States offers Freedom to all, and there is no one here I need to placate; but this position suggests self-examination: “If this is so, why do I feel dislocated?⁶¹ Perhaps there is a wider polity