Dear Marion,

This is the second part of my letter which I'll hold
until Tuesday, but as always I type into the computer
file what's on my mind "in real time".

It probably never occurred to you that owls are by nature
members of the cemetery staff, baby owls no exception.
Here in Konnarock the owls have treated us to their whooting
serenade on many a night as long as I can remember.
My mother reported her own grandmother's interpretation,
who, when she heard the call of an owl, would comment:
"Die ruft einen." (She's calling someone.) echoing what I
suppose to have been, if not to be, a popular superstition,
that the voice of the owl is the summons of death.

So far as the unfortunate Mr. Strauss-Kahn is concerned, we're
about to witness a bloodless toned-down latter-day crucifixion.
I can well understand your pre-occupation with his desperate
situation, a fate which seems to me eminently apposite to the
topic about which we've been corresponding. To discourage others
from similar wrong-doing, he is about to be made an example like
Bernie Madoff, about to be sacrificed "to take away the sins of
many."  I, as you may suspect, disagree with the conventional
judgment that "if he did it" he ought to be punished, because
I'm convinced, fundamentally, "we all do it," though perhaps not
in such grand style. Nor am I persuaded "that he will be given
"a fair trial" to determine his innocence or his guilt. I have
expert qualifications to evaluate the fiction that legal
proceedings should be fair. The "criminal who did it" and
"deserves to be punished" is precisely the person Isaiah wrote
about in Chapter 53: the man who was so despised that we esteemed
him not and hid as it were our faces from him.  Admittedly I live
in a very different world from this particular victim. To pay
$3000 a night for a hotel room is to me an inconceivable
extravagance. If it weren't for Margaret, I'd nap in the car in
a rest area and save the 52 dollars that we'll pay an "Econolodge"
on our way back to Belmont in 2 1/2 weeks.  I may have told you
that in 1939, I hiked from Battery Place to Columbus Circle in
NYC to save the 5 cents subway fare, and I have the gall to brag
about it.

You write:

"The crucifixion story, and dwelling on the
physical body of Christ and what befell it,
is kind of repelling to me. It is striking
how Catholic tradition exerts itself to make
all this intimate and immediate to the parishioner. 
They take communion, incorporating the body of
Christ into their own.  They are urged to gaze at,
meditate on, the horrifying crucifixion of the
innocent and holy son of God, and encouraged to
re-enact it in processions and passion plays,
to become part of the action.  It's very physical,
elemental. In that sense it's up your alley.......
You always want to DO things, to PARTICIPATE,
to be part of the action, as a prerequisite for
understanding."
 
and I reply: another first - I never thought I would find myself
defending the Catholic tradition. To be sure, it's not _my_ 
tradition, but I try to understand it, and explain to myself
what it means. Whether you will "buy" my explanation, is another
matter.

If I'm correct that the crucifixion is emblematic of the
cataclysmic fault line between the individual and the group,
and if that cataclysm defines and limits the existence of _all_
human beings, not just the intelligentsia among us, then there
is a need to make that cataclysm real and compelling even to
the naive, childlike and simple-minded. The significance of the 
profusion of illustrations, in drawings, etchings, water-colors,
paintings, reliefs, sculptures of the crucifixion is to make
persuasive and compelling the effects of the inescapable and
irreparable fault line of the confrontation of the individual
and the group.  I agree with you that autopsy (etymologically,
"seeing for oneself") is an experience far from delicate or
delicious. However, unless one is willing and able to carry
out the autopsy, one will never learn about the disease. The
autopsy of the spirit is if anything more indispensable than
the autopsy of the body.

Preliminary to the crucifixion: the Passover Seder as the feast
epitomizing the the Jewish tradition, the past, commemorating
the suffering of the Jews in Egypt and their subsequent redemption.
When Klemens' marriage revived the seder tradition in our family,
I went, I observed and I participated. I had my own feelings and
thoughts. Shouldn't the Passover Seder be a time of reflection,
of sadness, of mourning?  Rilke, who was brought up a Catholic,
wrote a poem which is relevant:

Das Abendmahl

Sie sind versammelt, staunende Verstörte,
um ihn, der wie ein Weiser sich beschließt
und der sich fortnimmt denen er gehörte
und der an ihnen fremd vorüberfließt.
Die alte Einsamkeit kommt über ihn,
die ihn erzog zu seinem tiefen Handeln;
nun wird er wieder durch den Oelwald wandeln,
und die ihn lieben werden vor ihm fliehn.
Er hat sie zu dem letzten Tisch entboten
und (wie ein Schuß die Vögel aus den Schoten
scheucht) scheucht er ihre Hände aus den Broten
mit seinem Wort: sie fliegen zu ihm her;
sie flattern bange durch die Tafelrunde
und suchen einen Ausgang. Aber er
ist überall wie eine Dämmerstunde.

Rainer Maria Rilke, 19.6.1903, Paris 

The nominal subjects of Seder meditation, Egypt and the Pharaoh,
were displaced in my thoughts by Buchenwald, Dachau, Auschwitz,
Theresienstadt - and the experiences of those who suffered and
died there, Jews and Gentiles alike, became immediate and compelling
to me, in embarrassing contrast to the mindless frivolity that 
turns a solemn memorial into a family party. I said nothing,
I was never reprimanded, but I was very sad, and in consequence
of my demeanor I was in effect expelled from the family. Laura's
parents never again invited me to their home, and Klemens never
again instituted a Seder in the house that I had given to him
and to Laura.

As always, I'm much adverse to prosyletizing; I'm anything
but a promoter of the Lutheran Communion to which I was 
introduced in Konnarock; I don't dispute our grandfather who
said that the food is the best part of the Jewish religion.
It deepens the understanding to contrast the Seder with the 
Communion. I read the relevant essays in Wikipedia as reliable
summaries, having been written by enthusiastic and experienced
supporters of the respective facets of the tradition. Both
ceremonies strike me as attempts to reconcile the present with
a very distant past. The individual participating in the Seder
fuses with the family group. A person purporting to celebrate
a Seder in solitude would appear incongruous. The various
actions prescribed for the Seder are pure ritual. As mere 
symbols, they have no effect on the lives of the participants.
Their real functions are to enhance the solidity and power of
the clan. The individual performs the required action for no
purpose other than to demonstrate and to affirm his/her group
membership.

That the instructions for the Seder serve to confirm the solidarity
of the group rather than to achieve any particular objective,
seem to me pertinent also to the plethora of directives in the
Pentateuch about numerous societal issues as well as about
dietary matters, even when that law or rule purports to address 
a socially significant imperative. This ancient function of regulation
as consolodating society seems highly relevant also to the contemporary
scientific/social/political scene, specifically the flood of directives
and "guidelines" inundating the medical landscape, all of which
have the nominal purpose of "improving" the quality of professional
activity and its results; but which primarily solidify the power
of the professional/governmental bureaucracy. Most of such guidelines
are based on flimsy evidence and rather than improving the quality of
practice, may well have the opposite effect. 

The so-called "Last Supper, das Abendmahl, that most memorable of
Seders is the watershed between the two facets of the tradition,
focussing as it does not upon the distant Egyptian past, but on
the present and on the human sacrifice in the immediate future.
The injunction to eat this bread as (if) my body and to drink of
this cup as (if) of my blood, harking back as it does to an utterly
primitive cannibalism has always been profoundly perplexing. I am
at a loss for a theological reason; the literary explanation might
be that the impending crucifixion lays bare such deep conflicts of
human existence that it reaches a premordial stratum where men did
obtain physical nourishment from each others flesh and blood. The
metaphor is made all the more plausible by Isaiah's reference to
the victim of persecution as "a lamb led to the slaughter"
presumably as a source of physical nourishment. The cannibaloid
conceit had far-flung historical consequences, Zwingli and Calvin
arguing that in the ritual re-enactment the transformation of wine
and bread into blood and flesh was symbolic only; while the earthy
and literal minded Luther insisted that the transformation was
actual: the wine did turn into blood, and the bread did turn 
into flesh, a disagreement which occasioned the shedding of much
real blood. Perusal of the prolific theological arguments
regarding this issue suggests that here as in other phases of
thought, language and logic create a factitious reality, a
spurious universe, remote and unrelated to existential experience.

One of the most consequential facets, seldom commented upon, of
the Last Supper is that by revealing the betrayal by Judas, it
served as a stage for the dissolution of the community. "Wahrlich
ich sage euch, einer unter euch wird mich verraten." Verily
I say unto you, one of you shall betray me. Betrayal is perhaps
the epitome of all community. The clear implication: It might have
been any one of the twelve Disciples. By the roll of the dice, it
turned out to be Judas. He served as the scapegoat for the guilt of
the other eleven. Judas then assumed the role and function of him
who was "despised and rejected ..."  Judas became the secondary
or supplemental sacrifice. Arguably, Judas' "betrayal" was in fact
a blessing which set Jesus free from the other Eleven and made it
possible for him to fulfill his destiny. I have often considered
that perhaps it was Judas who was the true disciple, because it
was Judas who made the supreme sacrifice for Jesus.

In a thin theological monograph which I found in Konnarock and
have subsequently misfiled - somewhere -, Albert Schweitzer
examines the question in what Judas' betrayal might have consisted.
Schweitzer points out that the Biblical description of Judas as
identifying Jesus to the arresting soldiers by kissing him, is
implausible; since his public preaching had made Jesus a 
recognizable figure requiring no identification. Schweitzer
hypothesises that Judas betrayal was his disclosure to the
ecclesiastical establishment of Jesus' claim to being divine or
being the Son of God, but this hypothesis is in turn implausible
because in his sermons Jesus had often enough referred to God as
his Father. So there's no end to perplexity.

In sum, I urge you to practice tolerance. Consider that Jewish
rituals are likely to seem as strange to Catholics as Catholic
rituals seem to you. Some day, when you are at loose ends, read
Lessing's Nathan der Weise, and endorse our grandfather's
appropriation of the words of Frederick the Great: In meinem
Staate soll jeder nach seiner Fasson selig werden.
Jochen