LITMIR.BIZ

      You must be wondering what Ein Sof is like. It’s too early to tell with any certainty. What I can say is that it’s a place like no other I’ve ever known -- strange and vaporous, distant, shrouded in a torpid and soothing insensitivity toward anything that is not Ein Sof. And yet, it’s also exasperatingly familiar, the embodiment of every cookie-cutter township I’d passed through on my way to ever-elusive Shangri-las.

      This could be Anytown, Anywhere, the carbon copy of a thousand unremarkable clusters of human habitation thrown together pell-mell and without regard for growth and looming overpopulation. And like all booming outposts, it’s a community so self-absorbed, so utterly indifferent to the rhythms and convulsions that mark the world beyond its gates, that it proclaims itself the center of the universe. Outwardly bucolic and easy-going, inwardly fettered by all the habits and attitudes the transplants brought with them, it’s a realm given to ethnocentricity and religious tribalism. Its denizens are bonded -- or cleaved -- by common ancestry, language, culture and doctrine. Hardened by custom and repetitive ritual rather than encoded bigotry, their brand of elitism appears to be stripped of overt hostility. For the rest, it’s live and let live. Ask the Perpetuals (as Ein Sof’s citizens dub themselves with gargantuan snobbery) why they limit contact with those who are not of their own kind, and they’ll tell you that they’re protecting ancestral mores from outside influences. It’s a feeble argument endlessly repeated and vehemently defended. These are the same people who assert that they can find the answers to all questions by asking as few questions as possible and who, while preaching virtue, claim that virtue cannot be taught. Like humans everywhere, they cultivate specious or illogical arguments to justify their own values while rejecting the equally dogmatic values of their neighbors and compatriots.

      Protagoras would have been proud.

      Regardless of their race or creed, Perpetuals put a premium on what they call unpretentious living -- plain attire, time-honored cuisine, modesty and temperate language. It would be useless heresy to suggest that what they consider simplicity, humility and temperance might appear to others as ostentation, duplicity and conceit. This perception, were they to acknowledge it, would be blunted by what they would argue is their austerity. Indeed, Perpetuals shun all but indispensable conveniences, among them the telephone. Their aversion for remote voice communications stems from their belief that this “infernal device,” as they describe it, interferes with their quasi-monastic lifestyle, which depends in large part on a conscious separation from worlds and idiosyncrasies that are not their own. The telephone, they insist, brings the “outside” into the home; it intrudes on the privacy and sanctity of the family and interferes with social interaction by eliminating face-to-face, intimate discourse. Naturally, almost everyone has a telephone, suitably hidden from view in some secret alcove and used only in unspecified “extreme emergencies.”

      Perpetuals make no effort to convince their neighbors of their right not to be like them. If anything exists, they insist, it can be comprehended only by those who engender it. It’s one way of rationalizing an isolationist existence.

      Life, as it were, revolves around the family compound, centering on shared activities reminiscent of the failed communal settlements of the 1960s. Those who don’t conform, can’t be convinced to change their ways or transgress against a member of the clan are snubbed. Like Abraham, they live in a twilight zone of abridged human contact and enforced silence. They can speak out; but no one answers. Ever.

      Key concepts that form the core of Ein Sof’s collective ethos include the rejection of pride and arrogance; the cultivation of diffidence, serenity and poise, often interpreted as “submission” or “letting-be,” but perhaps better understood as a reluctance to be considered presumptuous, narcissistic, or overly assertive. Perpetuals greatly value harmony (even if it takes discord to restore it) and adhere to a strict hierarchy. Defiance of established rules, behavior or language perceived to threaten the idyllic uniformity to which Perpetuals aspire, and violation of the pecking order are sternly censured.

      The thing Perpetuals fear most is the danger that non-conformists, dissidents and critics pose to the established order. It was not without some reticence and chagrin that my parents, aware if not always supportive of my once eccentric lifestyle and the great polemics my writings had stirred, felt compelled to drive this point home.

      “Perpetuals,” my father explained, shrugging his shoulders, “place a high premium on maintaining the unity of the clan. Their ostensible eagerness to submit to codes that impede free will seems at odds with the blatant egoism, distrust and hostility so evident in their daily lives. You may want to take note of this dichotomy.”

      “Nor do codes prevent selfishness and vanity from rearing their ugly heads, even in far-flung places like Ein Sof,” my mother added.

      “Looks like the virtuous always take refuge in paradox,” I ventured.

      My father laughed. My mother beamed at the son she had spawned.

      Not surprisingly, members of the neighboring clans, all of whom also live in self-reliant autonomous enclaves and are bound by the same social strictures and domestic obligations, treat outsiders with distant civility. They acknowledge each other with frosty reserve; they rarely stop to converse. “Separate but equal” comes to mind.

      Equality has never been a guarantor of justice.

      *

      It took me no time to realize that I was breathing the air of sorcery and fear. No, it wasn’t medieval witchery but the subtler Satanism of homogenized ideas. If legend and tradition and rigid convictions shape the Perpetuals’ thoughts, actions, notion of the cosmos, of God, of an afterlife, then they must also perforce be the cauldron in which simmer all their fears, prejudices and dormant hostilities.

      While freedom of thought and speech are tolerated -- up to a point -- freedom of action through radical speech is not. You may utter what you honestly think is true, if you express yourself with a tact bordering on circumspection. Open dissent and rabble-rousing, especially the kind that ignite the imagination and stoke the intellect, are forbidden as they threaten the power base and tend to disrupt the structured unity of the governed. Freedom of conscience, in any literal sense is a luxury that the Perpetuals forfeited in favor of group cohesion and safe, soothing, intellectual inertia.

      Their idea of the archetypal clan is that of a monolithic group of related individuals who submit to a system of commandments, decrees, unwritten rules and hazy taboos that generally inhibit the exercise of pure logic. They reject philosophy, which is guided by reason, in favor of faith, which is steered by prophecies, commands, injunctions and strict adherence to traditions lost in the fog of antiquity. It would be futile to suggest that, guided solely by tradition, men will inevitably be led astray. The mere concept of an ethos that rejects or bypasses tradition is unimaginable to them. Or so they claim.

      The Perpetuals’ attempt to regulate their affairs through revelation and tradition has led to an odd social contract that discourages freedom of thought and bans concepts that in any way contradict their self-view, which they fiercely defend. In such a system men are not united by free association; they are led by a “higher authority” consisting of self-anointed shepherds and arbitrary credos to which they must profess unconditional allegiance. Such society cannot survive unless it faces the world outside its own with a mask of unyielding if refined belligerence, feeling threatened to its very core by rational thought, whose voice it doggedly tries to silence.