LITMIR.BIZ

      Nobody ever liked my father. He had such a polarizing effect that people either adored and revered him or were appalled by his often maverick theories. But he was as irreverent about ideological popularity as he was about his trademark fashion sense — white socks with an ill-fitting suit. “How can I make an impact on society unless I turn it on its tuchous?” he would implore. It was all a puzzle. Each idea led to another and my father was just piecing it all together. He insisted there were no new ideas, just new pairings of them.

      This made him a landmine of paradox: a minister’s rabbi, a therapist’s ego, an enemy’s friend. If you meandered unsuspectingly through his thought process, something would surely detonate. He would drop ideas into conversation, ideas he was often just trying out to see what they’d ignite.

      I once found a collection of written evaluations of some of his lectures. They began as complimentary: a visionary, great use of the human condition, my favorite seminar. As I poured through these responses, I was bathed in naive pride. And then, without warning, the father I knew reared his shiny head — I found the presenter arrogant, confusing, politically incorrect. Ah yes, this was the father I remember! This was the father I spent my childhood and young adulthood trying to impress, the man for whom I selected a career in writing and traveled the world to prove my sense of adventure. Bold, irreverent, unafraid. He brushed with fate, did not adhere to rules he did not personally create, and loved to provoke — thoughts, anger, joy, just thinking differently. The man who could write “How to Succeed in Therapy without Really Trying,” interview Satan as “The First Family Counselor,” and dare to challenge Jewish lore with “The Myth of the Shiksa.”

      I used to think my family was typical. Didn’t everyone discuss the dysfunctional relationship between a football coach and his wide receivers at the dinner table? And what is so surprising about a rabbi who zips his sports car into his allotted parking spot at Temple with a handful of speeding tickets and skid marks in his wake? It was as if we had our own Commandments with the “original sin” as the seduction of self. Our edicts included directives like: Thou shalt not blame others for your own insecurities / Thou shalt learn and grow from challenge / Thou shalt not will change. And the ever popular, Thou shalt make an impact on society.

      I had my first encounter with Dad’s thought process while preparing for my Bat Mitzvah. Left alone to write my speech, I thought the Encyclopaedia Britannica could say it much better than I. My father might have ignored this brush with plagiarism, but it was my perspective on God that got him spinning. He sent me back to my desk, armed with a pencil and a heady conversation, to write my unique views. Today, I can trace my ability to take “facts” and bend them into new forms to that thorny encounter with my father, who taught me to be more concerned with critical thinking than with data.

      Retrospectively, it now seems obvious that my father was grooming me to be a writer. Not only did our family mix metaphors, we also played an endless round of the “synonym and homonym game.” I don’t exactly remember what the prize was, but I was so conditioned that whenever I came upon words that sounded the same, I would burst out of my room chanting my discoveries out loud. A well-injected curse word was also quite acceptable when it came to verbal expression. I seem to recall that “bitch” was the highest compliment my father could pay me — it meant that my progression of thought had mixed with sentence structure to render him speechless. Ultimately, it meant I had one-upped him. A lifetime goal, I suppose.

      But responsibility trumped words. As so many of his writings show, from “Empathy Defeats Therapy” to A Failure of Nerve, my father was resolute in his assertion that words are empty without the

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