In a truly extraordinary and courageous essay of self-revelation, First Things' David P. Goldman, who outed himself recently as author of the "Spengler" columns, talks about his membership in Lyndon LaRouche's "gnostic cult," how he broke free of it, and how he eventually became a religiously observant Jew. Excerpt:
Around 1985, the ugly awareness that I had spent almost a decade in a gnostic cult coincided with a dark time in my personal life. Deeply depressed, I sat at the piano one night, playing through the score of Bach's St. Matthew Passion, and came to the chorale that reads: "Commend your ways and what ails your heart to the faithful care of Him who directs the heavens, who gives course and aim to the clouds, air and wind. He will also find a path that your foot can tread." For the first time in my life, I prayed, and in that moment, I knew that my prayer was heard. That was a first step of teshuva--of return....Still, it took me a long time to find my way back to religious practice. I began studying the Jewish sources and joined a synagogue in 1993. A.J. Heschel's book The Sabbath began my slow accommodation to Jewish observance: Reading his account of the Sabbath, I kicked myself for thirty-five wasted years.
Still, it was not until I began to study Franz Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption during the early 1990s that I was able to reconcile my experience of prayer with my sense of the sacred in music. By then I had published academic articles on Renaissance music theory, including a 1989 study in the Vatican's music journal about Nicholas of Cusa's contribution. Studying the origins of Western classical music also helped me put religious things in perspective. Magnificent as it is, music remains a human construct, with a hint of divine inspiration in some cases, but not a substitute for God. The great works of Western classical music are not revelation, but they are perhaps the next best thing. Next best, however, no longer seemed good enough.
More:
In reviewing my own missteps in life, I feel that temptation to represent myself as a monster in order to cover up something even more painful: I was a coward. I was afraid of being Jewish. Everything else is rationalization. My intellectual life really began only a quarter-century ago when I reconciled myself to being Jewish. The truth is that I did not think my way into praying. I prayed my way into thinking.
I prayed my way into thinking. Really, read the entire essay, in which the author spares himself nothing.
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For more information about the LaRouchecult, look here:
http://american-lycurgus.blogspot.com/
John E. You are quite welcome.
"So perhaps it makes sense that Bach's work, which is generally agreed to be Really Good Art, would contain Universalities that would inspire a cultural Jew to connect - in a positive reaction to the Art - with his Judaic Religious Impulses, even though The Passion is a Christian theme."
John E., yes, that makes a lot of sense. Interestingly, I took a Reformation History course in college, and the professor was a Jew (very secular, not practicing). And he often quipped that the best thing that came out of the Reformation was the music of Bach a couple of centuries later. I do think that Bach appeals to a sense of the divine in all of us, as does other great art. The way I look at it, God is the creator, and man is in His image, so when man creates something beautiful and exquisite it gives a certain glory back to God (whether intended or not).
Concerning LaRouche and people like him, I think part of their appeal is the .1 percent chance that maybe they're right, they do have all the answers, and everyone else is deluded.
Goldman's explanation of the proportionally high numbers of Jews in classical music is just as bizarre as any LaRouche formulation IMO. He suggests that the reason for these high numbers is that secular Jews are afraid to engage with God, and so play music in order to evoke feelings of the divine. Hmm, all right. Then where does that leave devout Jewish musicians, like the opera singers Jan Peerce and Richard Tucker? What about Jewish composers? What about Jewish converts to Christianity, of whom there historically have been many in both performance and composition? What about non-Jewish classical musicians? Do they, too, turn to music because they fear the encounter with God? I dunno. It seems to me that someone ought to be editing the editor.
It's just irresponsible to call Goldman a pseudointellectual. I'm an academic in one of his fields (he dropped out of three different PhDs, IIRC,) and his work in this field was by no means insignificant - he studied and worked with the best.
Then there's the minor matter of his great success on Wall Street. He claims to have made a killing, then left his firm for principled reasons in 2005. I'm not competent to talk about his career in finance except to note that many have failed to do as well as he, although I suppose many twits have done better also.
"Pseduointellectual" is a much better description of someone like Matthew Yglesias, Andrew Sullivan, Ann Coulter, Keith Olbermann, etc. Goldman is a prestigious guy with very significant accomplishments. Even if you think he's nuts, he's far from being a mere poseur.
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