Debating Salvation

A smart aleck finds his niche

By JUDY BOLTON-FASMAN
M Oppenheimer (do not publish again) (photo credit: avi katz)
M Oppenheimer (do not publish again)
(photo credit: avi katz)
FOR YEARS I TRIED TO FIGURE out my son. This is a kid who once warned me, “Don’t ask me about my day.” I remember vividly what he was wearing – a white turtleneck festooned with little trucks and green corduroy pants. I was astounded by his ability to verbalize exactly what he was thinking. He was two.
By the time he was in kindergarten, my boy’s verbal precociousness blossomed into seemingly well-reasoned wise-guy arguments.
His classmates didn’t appreciate my son’s facility with language as much as we did, and the teachers were puzzled about what to do with a pint-sized motor mouth. In the next few years, whenever I asked him to do something about which he was not exactly enthusiastic, he’d zing me with witty comebacks and pseudosensible points. He was hilarious and exasperating.
I told him to save his cleverness “for arguing before the Supreme Court.”
It wasn’t until I read Mark Oppenheimer’s charming memoir that I had an apt description of my son: “…a smart aleck is a smart guy gone bad, a boy whose smartness is being used stupidly, while a wisenheimer actually lacks wisdom. He might not be cruel, he might not mean harm, but a wisenheimer is a smart guy you wish had a little less smarts.”
My kid is a bona-fide wisenheimer.
And to complete the picture, Oppenheimer notes that “In my mind [a wisenheimer] is Jewish, probably has glasses, and after insulting you runs out of the room before you can throw a punch.” To be even clearer – a smart kid is not necessarily a wisenheimer. But a wisenheimer is always a smart kid. Oh, and this particular personality type is a boy.
(Note, however, that beyond high school, the Debating Salvation Judy Bolton-Fasman A smart aleck finds his niche level of emotional balance and cognitive capability may be eligible to receive that imaginary dream or visions through prophecy.
They’ll be ready for it because they can understand their imagination expressed in the dream and vision.
“Some people would argue that very few people have this capability. What Freud claims is that every human being has the capacity of imagination for dream analysis, and that he can help you through the process of understanding how to cognitively deconstruct it, so that you won’t go crazy from your dreams; you can use it rather to help understand your wish fulfillment and what is happening to you. To say that all people can use their imagination as a power rather than as a distortion is a profound concept.
“With Freud, the whole process of therapy is to discover the unconscious and the unknowable through the vehicle of the psychoanalytic process, allowing the human to access the unconscious, and thereby make the unconscious known. The lifelong journey is to discover the unknown within the human being. There is a powerful parallel between Rambam and Freud. For Rambam the lifelong journey is to understand God.
The metaphors given by the prophets to understand God is their attempt to make the unknown known. For Freud, the psychoanalytic process is the challenge to understand the unknown within the human being,” Weiss points out.
As strong as the parallels between these two great thinkers may be, the authors of the book do not ultimately claim that Freud derived his ideas from the Rambam. What they do suggest is that the possibility of Freud – the young man – encountering the Rambam’s writings offers the tantalizing possibility that the great medieval thinker acted as precursor to the originator of modern day psychoanalysis.
Though they admit that no such text written by Freud acknowledging this debt has yet been discovered, they do bring powerful evidence to demonstrate that such a link is highly likely. Other recent discussions of Freud’s “Jewish” backgrounds (such as the studies by Joseph Berke and Stanley Schneider reviewed in these columns) suggest that Freud was none too keen to openly admit to such a pedigree. In the Vienna of his time it would have been embarrassing, if not indeed dangerous professionally. At best one can say, as J.L. Borges says in his witty pseudo-essay on Kafka’s influences, that “every author creates his own precursors.”
Perhaps, however, this present study has even more profound implications than a mere curiosity of intellectual history. Both Rambam and Freud were drawn to the unknown, the hidden. For the Rambam of the “Guide,” his search ends in the unknowable God of the philosophers, who is made accessible only by leaving aside philosophical speculations and accepting the revelations of the prophets.
For Freud, man’s impenetrability to rational analysis is tempered by the analyst’s ability to read and interpret our dreams. By such means, each thinker discovers the goal of his researches. For the medieval Rambam it is God, in all his metaphysical and paradoxical hiddeness. For Freud, heir to modern and more skeptical times, it is the inner core of man himself, whose apparent irrationality is open to logical analysis.
The present study – by no means an easy read, even for the expert – does at least make this ultimately metaphysical debate both more accessible and intellectually stimulating. • Maimonides’ Cure of Souls: Medieval Precursor of Psychoanalysis By David Bakan, Dan Merkur and David S. Weiss SUNY Press Paperback, 201 pages; $23.95 Hardcover, 201 pages; $65  wisenheimer turns into a creep).
Thanks to Oppenheimer’s crisp and succinct prose here’s how a parent knows she has a wisenheimer on her hands: “I had the nature to go with the nurture. I knew very big words and knew how to use them. More than that, I had mastered the entire conversational affect of a much older person. By the time I was six years old, I deployed adult clichés – dive right in, hit the road, take one for the team – with no selfconsciousness.
Over the years Oppenheimer translated his verbal acuity into pranks that eventually led him to the dark side.
He writes movingly about the time he practically destroyed an innocent family with his revenge-laden cleverness.
To get even with an 11-year-old classmate for rejecting his best friend, he called a state agency and reported that his friend’s father was abusing her. When the police became involved, Oppenheimer’s befuddled parents knew it was time to do something about their son. In seventh grade he went to a local private school, where he stumbled upon the debate team. Through a combination of good mentoring and the discovery “that debating was like finding my tribe,” Oppenheimer moved into the light.
ACARING TEACHER TOOK HIM under his wing and recommended that he apply to a more challenging prep school. Neither Oppenheimer nor his parents cared to see him at a boarding school.
There was, however, a great option 20 minutes away from his home in Springfield, Massachusetts: the Loomis-Chaffee School in Windsor, Connecticut. Oppenheimer was admitted to their high school.
At Loomis, Oppenheimer became a star debater. He writes movingly of his debate coach, a brilliant philosopher who taught him the intricate art as well as the beauty of debate. Oppenheimer explains: “One’s speech in a round of debate is, if everything is working just right, an eight-minute aria, with pauses for breath, with high notes and easy notes, with glimpses beyond the footlights to see if the audience is listening and to see if they love you.”
Oppenheimer also freshens brainiac stereotypes with observations like, “here’s the cruel irony, the better a debater you are, the bigger a loser you’re assumed to be.” He goes on to inform readers that “high school debate and oratory draw heavily from the ranks of the annoying: the walking dictionary, the wordsharp, the talker, the gasser, the jiver, the bloviator, the wisenheimer.”
There’s that word again. But in a coming-of-age book about the q u i n t e s s e n t i a l w i s e n h e i m e r, Oppenheimer is a d m i r a b l y restrained about using it. This may be due, in part, to the fact that that the heart of this memoir is about the painful, humorous and often poignant journey leading to adulthood. Wisenheimer or not, the journey is universal.
Akid who emulates Ferris Bueller or Alex P. Keaton, the buttoned down, briefcasetoting conservative teenager on the sitcom “Family Ties,” has the same insecurities and pitfalls as an adolescent who worships a sports icon or a pop star. Oppenheimer’s point is that at some time we all needed someone to look up to. Oppenheimer’s two anti-heroes inspired him “to take pride in my big words, and they gave me permission to discount my parents’ warning that sometimes I came across as rude or intimidating.”
Much of “Wisenheimer” relates various debates in which Oppenheimer participated, and celebrates the other debaters who, in hindsight, made those events fantastic spectacles.
These details may bore some readers. But as a New Englander, I happily nodded in recognition when he mentioned my siblings’ prep school (alas I’m only a wannabe). I was giddy when I saw my son’s school prominently mentioned among the schools with vigorous debate teams that Oppenheimer encountered. (Yes, my husband and I instinctively knew our wisenheimer also belonged in a prep school).
But there’s a satisfying payoff for any reader at the end of “Wisenheimer.” When he arrives at Yale, Oppenheimer is passed over for the debate team. He’s angry and disappointed, but to his credit he has a light touch with his “this is the best thing that could have happened to me” subtext.
During his non-debating freshman year, Oppenheimer explored relationships and concentrated on courses he might have otherwise missed. In short, he discovered that debate was a means to an end. He connected his love of debate and oratory with the study of religion: specifically, the study of American religious history.
“As a twenty-year-old college student, especially one who had spent the past seven years in competitive oratory, it was a revelation to hear that sermons could change the course of history. And as I read more religious history, I realized how many of our country’s great orators were deeply religious, in sensibility if not always in church attendance. Biblical allusions and sacred imagery permeated the speeches of Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan and Martin Luther King. All of a sudden, I was in a world of preachers.”
These days Mark Oppenheimer writes a biweekly column about religion for The New York Times, and teaches English and creative writing at Yale and Wellesley. As he writes: “On closer inspection, however, I realize that I too have stayed within the world of oratory – but as an observer, not a participant. I’m the grown-up musician or ballplayer, now happily watching from box seats.”
Through his work he has interviewed the New Age guru who was convinced she could cure her cancer with positive thinking, a Muslim cop, as well as the Holocaust denier who had a Jewish lover for almost a decade.
And he has learned that, although a little learning never hurts, the most memorable people were born talkers.
I can only hope that my wisenheimer – and all the wisenheimers out there – have similar mazal or luck finding themselves on their circuitous routes to adulthood.