The Book of Man

This is the Book of Man Johnson, a well-known inebriate who dwelt in the gutters of Beverly Hills where the exhaust fumes of Jaguars and Cadillac Convertibles were the heady stuff of existence. And existence it sure was, for during the sweltering evenings of August, it definitely wasn’t life.

It mattered not though, for Man Johnson was content with his existence. He lacked neither money nor a roof over his head. He ate from restaurant hand-outs and laid his weary body down wherever he happened upon a grass patch. Night and day were of no significance.

Thus it came to pass that a stranger in a double breasted pin-stripe suit approached him one day with some understandable hesitation and handed him a business card. That Man Johnson had forgotten how to read was not known to the man in the double breasted suit, so when he handed the card to Man Johnson, he was even more surprised to discover that Man Johnson was stuffing the card into his mouth. What the heck, sometimes a ‘burger, sometimes cardboard. As long as there was no poison in it, it was as good as food. Then he burped.

This was all just as well, because the card read “Ivor Lionel Grundman, Attorney-at-Law” and all the other stuff that people put on business cards. Lawyers write them even smaller than other people. And the reason why Ivor Lionel Grundman wanted to introduce himself to Man Johnson was to tell him that a Last Will and Testament had been deposited in favor of Man Johnson by his great-uncle Man Johnson. Uncle Man Johnson had left the tidy sum of fourteen million dollars to the only relative in his four hundred and twenty-one member extended family who had the identical name to his.

Ivor Lionel Grundman did not give the fourteen million dollar check in his pocket to Man Johnson. He took it out and, holding it in both his hands, showed it to Man Johnson. Reading, he had forgotten. But numbers had remained with him. Man Johnson beckoned to Ivor Lionel Grundman to come closer. He made sniffing sounds and pointed from the check to his nose, from the check to his nose.

Ivor Lionel Grundman held out the check, firmly between the thumb and forefinger of his hands, and with some trepidation brought it close to Man Johnson’s nose. Man Johnson sniffed in deep. Once, twice, three times.

“Well my man, it sure smells fine,” Man Johnson said. These were in fact the first words he had spoken in eleven years, ever since the day he had gotten laid at Milly’s Paint Store and Brothel on West Beverly Boulevard.

“It’s yours,” said Ivor Lionel Grundman, “if you can show me some sort of identification to prove that you are Man Johnson.”

Man Johnson looked at him blankly. Then, ever so slowly, he pulled from the inner pocket of his rumpled overcoat a passport, a driver’s license, his social security card, his American Express Gold card, his VISA card, his MASTERCARD, his membership card at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel Spa and Sports Club, and a card from the Howard Hughes Temple testifying to the fact that at the age of 44 he had undergone conversion to Judaism and was ritually circumcised by Dr. Ruth Wertheimer.

“I guess the money’s yours,” said Ivor Lionel Grundman and handed the check over to Man Johnson. Man Johnson took the check, sniffed it deeply thrice more, and ate it.

Back to Ethics

Judaism as a religion, as a nationality, as a culture and as a civilization has frequently been confronted by hurdles and challenges, by altercations and disputes, by threats and reactions. These have ranged from outright physical decimation to the amok pursuit of absolute modernity, from rigidity of rite to abandon of ritual, from moribund thinking to dilapidated acceptance or decrepit rejection of the new. In every age throughout the ages modernity has challenged Jewish leadership. It challenged Moses and Ezra and Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi. It presented hurdles before Maimonides and Buber and Heschel and Soloveitchik. Once, codification was the preferred solution – and it was followed at a later time by re-codification and by de-codification. When spiritualization was seized upon as opium for the masses, it was vehemently met from within by with catholicization. Enlightenment brought with it freedoms heretofore unknown to Jews, and the unknown brought forth denominationism, as Jews sought to redefine themselves yet again. And into the twentieth century there rushed Orthodox Jews and Conservative Jews, Reformed Jews and Reconstructed Jews, Secular Jews and Humanistic Jews and Atheistic Jews, a multiplicity of Hasidim and Haburot, Jews by Birth and Jews by Choice, Intermarried Jews and Intermarried non-Jews, all seeking – nay, demanding – a place, by right and not through charity, at the table of Jewish peoplehood.

Is this of essence a problem?

We have been an argumentative people ever since our inception. We are by definition stiff-necked. Our greatest religio-legal-philosophical work, and our most significant human contribution to humanity, the Talmud, is born and borne of argumentation. There has never been a single interpretation of Judaism. Elu VaElu Divrei Elokim Haim – These and These are the words of the Living God. A plethora of thoughts and opinions and ideas and views and judgments have historically been our strengths, not our weaknesses. Why then does it come as a very small surprise that at the outset of the twenty-first century there has arisen once again a desire for a New Big Jewish Idea?

I believe that despite the inherently positive cacophony that we observe around the Jewish table, we have not found yet a common language with which we can all address one another. In many ways denominationism has turned to demonization. Many in the Orthodox establishments, feeling ever threatened, have become more insular. Reform Judaism is extending a new embrace to traditions, creating puzzlement as to why it previously divested itself of them. Conversion is looked upon as a solution to the problem of Jewish Demographics, and is also looked upon as the problem of Jewish Demographics. Even Israel, once the great unifier of the Jewish Diaspora, too frequently is found in the role of dissembler of Jewish unity. There are too many around the Jewish table would gladly cancel another’s invitation.
None of this is new when viewing Judaism in an historical perspective. We will remain an argumentative people. The challenge is to reduce the level of acidity in the argument, to raise the level of respect within the row, to find the common in the conflict, and the familiar within the family.

Michael Steinhardt, in 2005 outlined a suggested solution to Jewish disunity with a proposal to create what he terms “Post-Denominational Common Judaism”. He rightly points out that the current denominationalism of Judaism has created fissures that appear unbridgeable, and thus a solution is a Judaism that is non-denominational. However, the question is how will this differ from Orthodox, Reform, Conservative or Reconstructionist Judaism? How will it not become yet another denomination?

Denominational Judaism is here to stay. So much time, thought, effort and tradition had been invested in each of Judaism’s denominations, that none of them are going anywhere. That is a given.

However, there is a common thread that runs across the entire Jewish peoplehood spectrum. It is widespread among Haredi Jews as it is among intermarried Jews. Orthodox Jews are as familiar with it as are Reform Jews, Conservative Jews and Reconstructionist Jews. It is prevalent among Secular Jews as it is among Hassidic Jews.

What is it?

It is Judaism’s basic commitment to ethics. To treating, judging, behaving toward one’s fellow man in an ethical, decent, charitable and righteous manner. It is the one singular universal concept that is the foundation for the normal functioning of a society –every society. And it is a Jewish idea – the one that makes us all partners in what Jewish philosophers from Maimonedes to Soloveitchik call Tikkun Olam, making the world a better place. It’s an ideal that unites us all, even though we may participate in an endless variety and sometimes even seemingly contrary ways. It’s an ideal that Jews as a people have brought to all of humanity - even to the peoples of the east, who at some stage in history matured separately and without connection to western development.

The Torah, as the foundation stone of Jewish civilization, is choc-full of ethical practices that form the basis of a properly functioning society. It taxes according to ability and distributes according to need. It defends the disadvantaged in the same manner as it protects the powerful. It demands justice as vehemently as it does righteousness. Tzedek Tzedek Tirdof and Ve’Ahavta LeRe’acha Kamocha are its mainstays.

These concepts are so familiar, so common, so universal that there is hardly a person walking the planet who is not aware of them. So what’s the big deal? The big deal is that they are concepts brought to the plaza of humanity by the Jewish people. And if we seek a Big Idea, a New Theme, a sense of commonality that all can identify with, that can be a bond between and among all Jews, that can reunite the unaffiliated with the community, it’s that we already have so much in common! The very ideas and ideals that are the basis of our society as we function today are already the ideas and ideals that we all have in common.

So, if this idea is already in everyone’s head and is already practiced universally, then – as in the famous Wendy’s commercial – “Where’s the Beef?” The answer is that the proverbial beef is missing. We all know how it tastes, we chew it and swallow it and enjoy it – but we don’t have an overt knowledge of where it comes from.

And here is where the common ethical ideal comes in.

It requires:

• The development of a mass-awareness program, one that permeates schools and universities, the written and electronic media and the internet, with analyses of current events and how the underlying ethical requirement in any given situation, suggests solutions that are indeed the ones chosen or those avoided, and explaining how those very ethical requirements that most Jews unknowingly and subconsciously hold as dear, have their origins in Jewish civilization.
  
• The development of curricula parallel to those already being taught, in Social Studies and Economics and Law and Medicine and Business Management, to teach and explain the ethical basis of the issues and their origins in Jewish civilization.

In this manner it can be made apparent to all that the very ideal and values that we all hold in common anyway, are in fact Jewish ideals and values, and thus the connection with Jewish heritage can be strengthened, the distant can be drawn closer on the basis of commonality and shared principles, and our peoplehood will be fortified as it faces the future reinvigorated.

Epilogue as Prologue

I sit in the departure hall at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, and I begin to put words onto paper. Where this will lead I do not yet know. I have for some time now been bursting with thoughts and feelings. Intellect and emotion have dammed up in me. Damned up, perhaps? Is it a cliché to say that I have begun to wonder what I am doing here? Not here in New York, but Here, in Life? The turmoil within has been welling up for ages. Ten, twenty, maybe thirty years. I am not a bookish person. Until relatively recently I read novels. Almost always, novels. Not for some time now. I am consumed with politics, history and philosophy. The Management of Life. Peter F. Drucker never wrote a book about that. Or maybe he wrote all his books only of that? I wonder. The turmoil within is indeed of many years. But it has been well dammed (damned?). I am the ultimate dammer. I keep in. Cost me my colon – that, I was not able to keep in. Ah, such is life. Keep in the emotion. Keep out the colon. There is a connection between the emotional and the physical. And it costs. However, since the death of my father – Adoni Avi Mori, my master, my father, my teacher – Rabbi Josef Jakub Fogel, may his righteous memory be a blessing, I am like the Dutch child with his finder in the cracking dike holding back the water. This crack is temporarily stopped up, but the developing cracks elsewhere in the dike permit seepage and before long the water will truly gush. Maybe that is why I am starting to write down what’s in my head. Dr. Meir Tamari told me some months ago to write. What should I write?, I asked then. He said, whatever you want, but write. So now I am writing.

I think this may be my manifesto, my legacy to my family? Will this be my dybbuk? This is a private family joke. So I will write about my thoughts and of that which resounds in the hollows of my mind. My introspection has increased since my father’s death. My pursuit of happiness has taken on greater significance in my life and in my pursuit of happiness. Life should not be a potato, filling, yet somewhat tasteless. Life should be a journey through the spice filled markets of experience. A search for the beautiful and (dare I use the word) the meaningful and the sensual and the spiritual and not necessarily in that order or in any order, but inclusive of all of these. Experientialism, I will call it. Life should be experientialist. Not hedonist, but experientialist. What is the difference? The difference is that my understanding of hedonism implies pleasure-seeking without a spiritual dimension. It may not be an accurate definition, but it is as I understand it. I do not condemn it nor judge it. But it is not mine. Experientialism demands that I seek out the world. One of my favorite stories is of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, leader of German-Jewish Orthodoxy in the late nineteenth century who very late in his life exerted himself to visit the Alps. When asked why he had done so, Rabbi Hirsch apparently responded: “After 120 years when I appear before God and He asks me ‘Have you seen my Alps?’ I want to be able to answer in the affirmative.” It is a spiritual imperative to visit the Alps. The Alps are a metaphor, of course. The teaching is that there is great beauty in the world. Everyone should see them. Believing people should regard seeing them as a religious imperative. A mitzvah, if you wish. See the world. Experience it. God wants you to do so, so that in the end of your days you will be satisfied with your life. My pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of satisfaction. I want to die satisfied. I know it will not be a complete satisfaction, but that is of no matter or consequence. It is not your task to complete the work, it is taught in Ethics of the Fathers, but neither are you free to desist from it. I don’t want to desist from it.

My mother’s death did not result in this introspection. Is that because her death, when it came, even though sure, was still a surprise, a shock, a devastation, a soul-rending experience for me. It was the first time death had entered my door. The pain of my mother’s death was a physical pain. It hurt me in every pore of my being. I had no cell that did not hurt. Could it be that this was a result of the knowledge that my mother had been actively neglected to death in the hospital? My justification at that time was that I believe that our lives end when they are supposed to, and God organizes things in such a manner that we die when we do. Mazminam Lepundak Echad. Thus God, I believed then, organized for my mother to be actively neglected to death. God organized for the cardiologist to be neglectful in not insisting that the nurses wash their hands before they treat their patients, and for all the doctors to be neglectful in not insisting that she receive sustenance and not remain unfed for three weeks, and for the nurses to be neglectful in not washing their hands before they treated my mother thus themselves bringing on the infection that killed her. And this in a hospital called Gates of Justice. It almost sounds Catholic. The thing is I then bore no anger against God for organizing my mother’s death. We die. We live and we die. It’s the way it is. Thus though I knew my mother would die on the day she did – the doctor told us “the situation is very severe” (words I would hear again, possibly from the same doctor, in a different, wonderful hospital, a week before my father died) and that we were talking of hours, not days. Yet, when I left my mother the night she died, I was completely certain that I would see her the next day. In retrospect I imagine that somehow my denial of what was about to happen would not happen because I was denying to myself that it could happen. Denial is the great enabler of escape.

I did not look upon my mother’s face after her death. When I returned to the hospital after she had died her face was covered. I did not lift the sheet to see her. I did not want to see my mother in death. I am not sure today if that was a wise decision or not. It is what it is. I did not want to see my mother in death.

My father’s death on the other hand was equally sure for me, yet being present as his soul departed his compact, larger-than-life, small, thin, body has left me with two life-changing experiences. I have witnessed life coming into the world with the birth of my three children, and I have witnessed life departing this world as my father’s heart ceased to beat. Bearing witness to death, peaceful though it be, changed something in me. I do not know what it was that changed. But seeing my father, unconscious but connected to a respirator, watching the heart monitor detailing the diminishing beats of his sweet, good, kind, righteous, giving heart until it flat-lined, seeing the color of life draining instantly from his beloved face as the angel of death completed his task of the moment, changed something in me. A wondrous event. Exquisite in its painfulness. This is the experience that has moved me to action. What kind of action? I do not yet know. One action is putting these words onto paper. What a contrast! Life begins and ends. The stuff of life is transitory. Paper, paper-thin paper, remains as a testimony to the stuff of life that is the epitome of fullness. All life is reduced to paper and sometimes not even to paper. A fifteen minute eulogy at best and you are put into the ground, but not into the ground. Your body goes down. You live on, on the paper, and in voice and sound and cellulose. Now, you live on digitally. Eternity in ones and zeroes. A puzzling phenomenon.

Many years ago, when my father visited my sister and her family, he asked my niece "Where does Saba come from?" to which my niece replied "Airport". Oh, The lovely, sweet, gentle, beautiful and factual innocence of childhood. And so my father became "Saba Airport." Today I davened in a minyan twice at Kennedy Airport. Mincha & Maariv. Who would have thought? There is comfort in saying kaddish at the airport for "Saba Airport."

I am home. The return to Israel comforts me. Hamakom Yenachem Otcha Betoch Shear Avelei Zion Virushalayim. The greeting for the mourner. The Place will comfort you among the mourners for Zion and Jerusalem. Which Place? Traditionally, the reference is to God. The Omnipotent will comfort you. I like it the other way. The Place will comfort you. Which Place? Every place that was important to my parents comforts me. Most of all Israel comforts me. Returning to Israel comforts me. The sweltering heat in the sleeve connection to aircraft to the airport building overcomes me in its comfort. I am embraced by the sticky, heady air of Israel. It comforts me. Visiting my parents' apartment, now empty, comforts me. Seeing their tombstones, their final Place, comforts me. Ramat Pinkas comforts me and Thaba 'Nchu comforts me and Carletonville comforts me and Johannesburg comforts me and Cape Town comforts me and Netanya comforts me. Ra'anana partially comforts me.

The driver taking me home from the airport complains about a multitude of illnesses that are the stuff of life in Israel. I long to be at home. To see my chidren and be again in the arms of my wife, partner, friend, lover, confidante. To hold and be held. Welcome home.

Wiesel, Wieseltier, Wiesenthal

How odd to discover that these three men have had such an important influence on me during this past year, the year since the death of my father. None of them is new to me.
I have known of Elie Wiesel probably since the latter sixties, when he wrote his book Jews of Silence, about the confined Jews of the Soviet Union. I had met Elie Wiesel for the first time when we lived in Vancouver. He was invited to speak at a public event held in the synagogue at which I then served as rabbi, and Michele and I hosted him briefly in my office prior to the event.
My second meeting with him took place when I served as Director of Commemoration at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and he was being honored as the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Peace. I have never read any of the books he wrote, but I have heard and read many of his speeches. I also have a pseudo-familial connection with him seeing as he comes from the same vicinity as my mother, he from Sighet in Romania and my mother from Solotvina, then in Slovakia (today in the Ukraine – who says countries don't keep the territories they conquered in war?), a distance of some four kilometers between them, and they were both transported to Auschwitz on the same day – possibly even on the same train.
Elie Wiesel's themes seem to me to excoriate the loss of innocence in the world. Whether his descriptions of the loss of his own innocence at a very young age, or the failure of Christendom to maintain its own innocence by permitting, if not encouraging, the Holocaust, or possibly even the desertion of innocence by God in those same years. The Holocaust pervades everything that Wiesel says, writes and does. It is as it should be. It was the same for my father, and he verbalized it continuously. It was the same for my mother, she, however, never verbalized it overtly. But Wiesel's use of language is so beautiful, and his speaking of those words evokes in me a pathos that I find hard to describe in words. It is the emotion of immense sadness. It is in his eyes when he speaks. It is in the choice of words he uses. It is in his intonation. His words strike a chord in me, a chord that plays to my own melancholy about the unfairness of history. In a speech of his I read recently, and which I used in a series of lectures I delivered on a recent trip to South Africa, he refers to the oft-used adage that the Holocaust is often referred to as "man's inhumanity to man" – to which he responds with a loud and resounding and booming "No! – the Holocaust was man's inhumanity to Jews!" What a powerful truth. It was because Jews were not considered human that it was so easy for the killers to kill them.
I met Leon Wieseltier in Washington DC at the simchat bat that our family had all gathered to celebrate on the birth of my brother and sister-in-law’s twin daughters. Once again, I had known of him, but had never read anything he had written. This meeting was nothing more than a “hello-hello.” I came across him again in his book “Kaddish” which I read this year. I read it avidly, almost with bated breath. Here too, as in the words of Elie Wiesel, I found great pathos. While I never searched, it seems to me that Wieseltier has never stopped searching. His book is both a frustratingly unsourced and encyclopedic and all-encompassing excavation of the origins of the Kaddish prayer, and at one and the same time, a soul-baring tale of his feelings during his year of mourning for his late father. If I ever meet him again I will want to embrace him and thank him for writing this book. It comforted me many times this year. It wrapped me in solace. I thank him.
I met Simon Wiesenthal many times. The first was at La Guardia airport while Michele and I were waiting for a plane to Rochester via Syracuse. I saw him in the waiting area and remarked about it to Michele, who encouraged me to go and say hello, which I did. When I introduced myself he asked whether I was the son of Rabbi Fogel of Johannesburg. When I replied affirmatively he told me of his visit to Johannesburg at my father’s invitation. We parted and that was that. Many years later when I worked at Yad Vashem, I went out to greet him on one of his visits. When I introduced myself, he said: “Do you remember when we last met?” – and proceeded to recall the date (!) of our meeting and where it took place.
Our paths crossed numerous times after that when I worked in Jerusalem as Multimedia Learning Center Project Manager for the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.
I will never forget what he told me when he saw how astonished I was that he had remembered our first meeting. He said that in his line of work he couldn’t afford to only relegate information to paper because there was always the chance that someone would torch his archives, so he commits everything to memory. Astounding!
Thus the three W’s of this year, and their connection with the Holocaust, and thus to my parents and so to me.

The State of my People

On my way to shul in the morning I greet the neighbor in my mother-in-law's apartment buiding, but I receive no reply. I purposely say "good morning" to the people I pass on the street. Not one of them replies. We are a grumpy people this morning. And we have become hard of heart. A while ago a motorcyclist was knocked down by a truck. I assume the driver did not notice what he had done, and drove on. This happened in a busy intersection in the southern Tel Aviv. No-one stopped to help the injured motorcyclist. He lay on the ground as cars drove by. Some slowed to avoid driving over him, drove around him and continued. All this was captured on the traffic camera at the intersection. Traffic lights changed, and cars and trucks and vans came from a different direction, slowed, avoided and continued. This went on for over three minutes, until a passing motorcyclist, seeing his fellow sprawled on the street, stopped to offer assistance. Too late. The injured man died of the neglect of his fellow motorists. At least a hundred drove by him and not one stopped to offer assistance. The saddest piece of video I have ever seen. We are a morally bankrupt people. The suffering of our kin does not move us. We avoid. Avoidance is moral bankruptcy. We are a morally bankrupt people. A grumpy people who do not greet one another become a morally bankrupt people. An avoiding people becomes a morally bankrupt people. It makes me sad. I feel sadness for my people, about my people. How have we come to be here? How can it be that a people known in its own historical, cultural, religious, national sources as "merciful people, the children of merciful people" can politely avoid a dying man in the street? My heart breaks for the loss of my people. But it is not a new heartbreak, heartache. A people, the government of which can uproot thousands of its own citizens from their own homes, cast them out with uncaring at best and with gleeful animosity and worst, betray their promises to their uprooted citizens, and willfully and glibly and purposely ignore their pain – how can this be anything but a morally bankrupt people? Is not the very first role of government to protect its citizens? And my government does not, does not even make a half hearted attempt to protect those it so willingly and joyfully harmed and hurt and wounded. A morally bankrupt government of a morally bankrupt people.

On Belief

I am a tormented believer. Things need to make sense to me and belief, as I understand it, defies logic. Do I believe that God created the world? In fact, I do. And why do I believe this? I believe this because it makes sense. How does it make sense?
Well, scientific thinking as I have discovered it, promotes the Big Bang theory. There was a magnificent film I saw at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC entitled Cosmic Voyage. Narrated by the wonderful and talented and heavenly-voiced Morgan Freeman it tells the story of our universe from its largest to its smallest creations, and explains the Big Bang theory in a manner that is understandable and logically acceptable to even a layman like myself. I find no contradiction between it and the story of creation as relayed in the Bible. But here is where Science and I must part ways. What came before the Big Bang? Before all that gargantuan or miniscule mass exploded, thus bringing about the universe as we know it and of it today?

I can, and do, buy into the theory that all that is created is created by virtue of chemistry. Everything is can be traced down to its atoms. No problem with that one. Evolution makes plenty sense to me, and I have no problem with dinosaurs roaming the earth and everything coming from fish and even man evolving from more primitive species (I do however consider this to be unlikely because I am not sure that there exists any other species that evolved from a different species). I consider the biblical narrative of creation as non-factual, but rather as mythical, in terms of the Maimonidean principle of "Dibra Torah Bilshon Bnei Adam" – the Torah speaks in the language of Man, in a manner that man can understand. But not necessarily is the biblical narrative to be understood in a literal sense, neither does my sense of faith require it to be so. Thus, to my understanding there are no contradictions between Creationism and the Big Bang. To me, they are one and the same. The Bible, to my understanding, describes the Big Bang in the words "Let there be light." And this is how I return to the question above: what came before the Big Bang. If science explains the Big Bang as the primordial event that preceded all others, it must therefore measure time from that point and onwards. The Big Bang becomes the beginning of time according to scientific theory. However, to my understanding, science does no such thing. Time is of essence timeless. It is beyond itself. Time is timeless. Science calls it infinity. If it falls outside of the scope of even theoretically measureable science, it is infinite. Science calls it infinity. I call that God, and it is why I am a believer. But I am a tormented believer.
I am a tormented believer because I am not a true man of faith. I don't think I believe that God is involved in the world on an active basis. I am not moved to prayer and invocation in times of distress. When my mother lay being neglected to death in hospital, I was not moved to read Psalms or say special prayers. I didn't believe then that there was any efficacy in that. I am of the opinion that daily prayer is required of a person who considers himself religiously observant. I consider myself observant to the extent that ritual does play a role in my life, but I don't place great emphasis on ritual practice. Where I do place emphasis is on those attributes of Jewish religion that stress Mitzvot Bein Adam LeHavero – commandments that define the relationships between man and his fellow. In short, the social, ethical and moral aspects and precepts that Judaism impresses upon its adherents, is of great importance to me. According to them I attempt to lead my life. They are the foundations upon which my behavior is established.