Behold That Which You Have Not Before Seen
A Man
I promised you an ancient poem and said:
It's from the fellow who soon became the most admirable man in America for trying to stop the Holocaust. Nobody else came close.
The poem is no moral monologue or prophetic pedantry. It has more cuss words than you might have thought existed in 1936.
What it shows is that Holocaust-Stoppers and other such Singular Individuals are rarely professional saints, and never Team Players. They are those singular, rare humans who are free — even from morality.
All it takes for a human to be good - Exceptionally Good - is to own an unfettered soul.
The Image of God which is our natural shape will do the rest.
We all have ancestors, genetic and memetic. With any luck our genetic ancestors are more or less known to us — it's our memetic ancestors who are important to suss out.
Fortunately — while you can't choose your biological parents — you can choose your ideational forebearers. Mine are those few individualist Free Thinkers who existed in worlds before us.
My primary intellectual hero on my Jewish side is Rambam - aka Maimonides, aka Abu Imran Musa bin Maymun ibn Abdallah - while on my American side, my father was Ben Hecht. His father was HL Mencken,1 and Mencken's father was Samuel Clemens.2
Being as Ben Hecht was the ONLY man in the powerful United States of America, Jew or Gentile, to emerge from the unfortunate events of 1939-1945 with his honor intact, it's important to know who was even before that time. Was he a weeper for the sins of man? A Jew beholden to Jehova and his chosen people? A do-gooder and uplifter with his heart enslaved to messianic hopes?
Nyet.
He was a free-souled human, an Image of God, who knew that he lived in chains and sought to break them at every turn.
He knew the forces that played upon him and he thrashed angrily against them — angrily, but joyously and with a happy spirit.
And in showing us what A Human truly is, he bids us study our own selves, and how we have arrived at who we are.
I've written and recorded a great deal about Ben Hecht before.
I've un-paywalled the following letter, for it has the most to bear on the current matter: Ben Hecht in his dotage, upon seeing his baby — The State of Israel turned from its tremendous human & Jewish potential into just another politicial fiefdom. I videod his introduction to Perfidy, here in Egypt, in celebration of Israeli Independence Day, and was subject to the singular act of antisemitic violence that I, an open rabbi, have experienced in my 10 months of living here. And it was by an American woman.
For additional articles with extensive quotes by the cancelled Hecht, enjoy our footnotes. 3 4 5 6 7
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I've written about and quoted a great deal of Mencken from impossible-to-find sources in many articles available in our Substack Library exclusively for paying subscribers Yadidya Members. For our purposes and of greatest relevance to this video, I'll add another, from the introduction to his volume In Defense of Women:
“As a professional critic of life and letters , my principal business in the world is that of manufacturing platitudes for tomorrow, which is to say, ideas so novel that they will be instantly rejected as insane and outrageous by all right-thinking men, and so apposite and sound that they will eventually conquer that instinctive opposition, and force themselves into the traditional wisdom of the race. I hope I need not confess that a large part of my stock in trade consists of platitudes rescued from the cobwebbed shelves of yesterday, with new labels stuck rakishly upon them…
“Nature, indeed, conspires against all such genuine originality, and I have no doubt that God is against it on His heavenly throne, as His vicars and partisans unquestionably are on this earth . The dead hand pushes all of us into intellectual cages; there is in all of us a strange tendency to yield and have done…
“At the moment of the contemporary metaphysician's loftiest flight, when he is most gratefully warmed by the feeling that he is far above all the ordinary airlanes and has an absolutely novel concept by the tail, he is suddenly pulled up by the discovery that what is entertaining him is simply the ghost of some ancient idea that his schoolmaster forced into him in 1887, or the mouldering corpse of a doctrine that was made official in his country during the late war, or a sort of fermentation product, to mix the figure, of a banal heresy launched upon him recently by his wife.
“This is the penalty that the man of intellectual curiosity and vanity pays for his violation of the divine edict that what has been revealed from Sinai shall suffice for him, and for his resistance to the natural process which seeks to reduce him to the respectable level of a patriot and taxpayer…”
Not the Mark Twain you were force fed as a tiny school inmate (any more than my father is the Ben Hecht script doctor who wrote Gone With The Wind). What a man does to make a living he often does under duress and can only be said to encapsulate his person if he embraces it. This Twain and Hecht had not done. To find the real Mark Twain look up his volumes of letters and other non-fiction - or his censored fiction, such as his shocking Letters From The Earth, that I read on my rabbinic radio show, to the scandalized populace of Southern California in 2005.
