Sublime

Traditional Zen training can, without a doubt, elicit and help resolve many personality conflicts that analytically-minded therapists would define and work with under very different conditions.

Heidegger perhaps needed what a later generation would call an ‘intervention’, to save him from himself. It was, Jaspers implied, a failure of engagement on his own part — and he linked this to a more general failure of tolerant, educated Germans to face up to the challenge of the time.

In an age of death and destruction, Rabbi Yohanan taught that a fundamental religious response was to increase loving-kindness and multiply life itself.

In private, meanwhile, he filled notebooks with philosophical thoughts alternating with Nazi-flavoured anti-Semitic remarks. When these ‘Black Notebooks’ were published in 2014, they provided yet more confirmation of something already known: Heidegger was a Nazi, at least for a while, and not out of convenience but by conviction.

to be a Jew is to cry out, even when silence would be safer, easier, and more convenient.

Rabbi Donniel Hartman refers to this core Jewish ethic of self-transcendence as the “ethic of non-indifference,” which he defines as the obligation “to see the needs of others and to implicate oneself as part of the solution.”