You Are Not Alone e-book final

YOU ARE NOT ALONEThe Conquest of Loneliness

By Rabbi Bernard Mandelbaum www.chirovideo.com

Version 1.00May, 2009

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Copyright © 2009 Raphael Rettner D.C. All Rights Reserved. www.chirovideo.com

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About the Author

The late Rabbi Bernard Mandelbaum was President Emeritus of the Jewish Theological Seminary Of America where he was professor of midrash and seminary professor of homiletics on the faculty of the Rabbinical Department. He was also President of the

Foundation for Future Generations. He was the editor of Assignment In Israel (a collection of essays), Harper and Row, Choose Life, Random House and Art and Judaism: A Conversation with Yaacov Agan and Bernard Mandelbaum.

In 1962 his scientific edition of a 6th century midrash, Pesikta de Rav Kahana, was published.

Professor Bernard Mandelbaum founded and was the first director of the Seminary’s Religio-Psychiatric Institute.

For 10 years, he was editor of NBC-TVs Eternal Light.




Table of Contents.......................................................................................................Introduction 5

.........................................................................Chapter 1: 3 Forms of Loneliness 7

..............................................Chapter 2: Insights into Loneliness From The Bible 9

...............................................Chapter 3: Ten Steps in Dealing With Loneliness 13

...............................................................Chapter 4: Quotations Of Great Insight 20

.........................................................................................Chapter 9 Conclusion: 24




Introduction

My name is Rabbi Bernard Mandelbaum. I am president emeritus of the Jewish Theological Seminary and former professor on its faculty. I am taking this opportunity to talk about probably one of the most distressing human problems, which I wrote about in a book called “You Are Not Alone, The Conquest of Loneliness”. The title itself suggests two things:1. It’s actually expressed by a grandmother of mine who lived with one of

her children, and if we called up and she answered the phone, I would say to her, “bubbie” which is the Yiddish for grandma. “Are you alone?” and her answer was, “Kain molnish Alaine, never alone”. Not everyone of us has this sense of God’s presence to feel that we are always with him. But if it isn’t God there have to be some values to occupy a person’s life if he is not to feel loneliness. That’s what I talk about in this book. But there is another sense to the title.

2. You are not alone in the sense that you are not alone in feeling loneliness because a lot of people, a great many people, feel that.

I decided to write about it because of my own feeling of loneliness after I lost my late wife. In the introduction I begin with a quotation from one of my great teachers at college, professor Mark Van Doren who wrote, “Whenever I have been afraid that my work was so personal that no one could understand it, everybody did understand it. When I tried to speak to others, they didn’t know what I was talking about.” In that sense I speak very personally about what I went through, what I considered the nature of loneliness. There’s an anonymous statement with which I begin the first chapter where it asks the question “Do you recognize yourself? That is, do you recognize the nature of your loneliness?” This anonymous source says




“He who overcomes loneliness, overcomes his greatest enemy”. The fact is there is loneliness in places where we least expect it.




Chapter 1: 3 Forms of Loneliness

In the opening chapter I tell the story of a youngster, a young lady who comes home from college and much to the disappointment of her parents who think that she is having a wonderful time at Vassar, which she was attending, She said “I am sorry mom, but Vassar is not what you think it is. It’s not exciting and challenging, quite the opposite. It’s lonely and I am not the only one who feels it. All the kids I know feel the same way, believe me that lovely, exciting and challenging school is the loneliest place in the world. Why, students hardly even nod at each other on campus. We don’t sit around the dorm rapping like bull sessions you and dad described from when you were in college 25 years ago. The fact is, loneliness is even on the college campus, even in the dormitory. There are all kinds of loneliness. It’s something that, is very hard to identify with if you haven’t experienced it in some form. I tell the Hassidic story of two good friends, who were sitting at a bar drinking and getting a bit inebriated and one said to the other, “Are you my friend?” and his friend said “What kind of question is that, you know I’m your friend.” He says to him, “Tell me do you know what hurts me?” The other fellow says, “How can I know what hurts you?” The first one said, “Well, if you don’t know what hurts me, how can you say you are my friend?” It’s this close identification with the feeling that gives one a sense of what the feeling is. And that’s true of loneliness. There are various forms of loneliness. I have categorized at least three:

1. Despondency: There is a gnawing almost subliminal sense of despondency. The pain is bearable, it just doesn’t seem right. A general




feeling of impatience and tendency to fly off the handle. You may not be content with what life seems to have dealt out to you. There is no companionship or friendship to speak of.

2. Impatience-A general feeling of impatience and tendency to fly off the handle. You may not be content to what life seems to have meted out to you. There is no companionship or friendship to speak of. Therefore, you lack someone with whom to share your hopes and frustrations. You tend to blame everyone around you; thus your impatience with others, especially their problems.

3. Deep depression. This is a feeling of actual pain caused by the intense sadness. In a superb volume, “Conquering Loneliness” the psychiatrist Gene Rosenbaum and his wife, Veryl, a psychologist detail specific symptoms of this malady, and it is a malady, called loneliness. I ask the listener, “Do you recognize yourself?” Have you heard yourself saying these words, “No one will ever care for me. I can’t go on. I feel so alone.” The Rosenbaum’s describe what is both a cause and a symptom of loneliness. Your self-critical eye is constantly seeking situations to prove to you how unworthy you are to keep you enslaved to loneliness. Are you as critical of your acquaintances as

you are of yourself? If this is the case, then you are in trouble.




Chapter 2: Insights into Loneliness From The Bible

The next chapter deals with insights into loneliness from the Bible. To quote from Genesis, “It is not good for man to be alone.” or from the Mishneh, developed from the Talmud, Hillel teaches, “Do not withdraw from the community”.




I begin the chapter with this interesting insight. It is easy to identify with the conviction expressed by Abraham Lincoln in the turmoil of his relationship with his wife. “To remain as I am is impossible. I must die or be better.” I remember how I felt when I was very lonely after I lost my first wife. I felt that I either have to get better or it is better not to be living. This sense of loneliness is something which was captured, the feeling that one has to develop. In dealing with loneliness, it led me to deeper insights into life. I was able to climb pretty high from the depths of loneliness. When my late wife passed away, I received a poem from a young friend, David Goodbaum which gave me a lift and led me to greater heights. “She is...,” the poem begins,“Do not stand at her grave and weep. She is not there. She does not sleep. She is a thousand winds that blow. She is the diamond glint on the snow. She is the sunlight on the ripened grain. She is the gentle Autumn rain. When you awake in the morning’s hush, She is the swift, uplifting rush Of quiet birds in circled of flight. She is the brilliant stars that shine at night. Do not stand at her grave and weep. She is not there. She did not die.”

This sense of my late wife’s immortality aroused again by this poem is something which I have come to believe in very profoundly. That there is life after death. That God who created the universe isn’t playing a game, that the meaning and the purpose of what we would call the soul of Judy, my late wife, is not something which just disappeared into thin air. What form that continuity takes place is something no mortal finite human being can know, but that it’s there, that it continues; this is something that I am convinced of from any kind of reflection on the ordered universe in which we live. It is an ordered universe. The universe was created with laws and order. If this was not so, it would not be possible to send a man into space and he be in space for over a year and end up on target. That you can only do if there are built-in laws and order in the universe which can anticipate the direction in which




a rocket would take. This contributed to my sense of purpose, a lack of loneliness and the conviction that what was has a continuity and an immortality all its own. It roots itself in the teaching of, not only the Bible, but as I say in the next chapter, in philosophers over the ages from Fichte, before that Plato, Aristotle all indicate that there must be a purpose in the universe and that the individual’s life just doesn’t get buried and has no continuity after a meaningful life. I also feel that I learned a lot about dispelling the clouds of loneliness from the meaning of the Sabbath day. Professor Abraham Heschel, a great philosopher who taught at the Seminary. He wrote many important books. It says in this book, on the Sabbath. “Three acts denote the Sabbath day. He rested, he blessed and he hallowed the seventh day. The prohibition of labors therefore added the blessing of the light and the ascent of sanctity. Not only the hands of man celebrate the day, the tongue and the soul keep the Sabbath.” One does not talk on the Sabbath in the same manner in which one talks on weekdays. Even thinking of business or labor should be avoided because it is the Sabbath Day. More than the Jews protect or observe the Sabbath, the Sabbath protects the Jews. Actually, the Sabbath is not a day of don’ts, don’t work, don’t watch television, don’t shop, don’t drive your car. When properly observed, the Sabbath is actually a series of do’s. Do spend time with your family. Do read, study and reflect. Do spend time at worship. It means you should occupy your time during the day, not with other worldly concerns but rather by calling on your own inner resources to live with meaning here on earth. My children, like all children, like television but we never had a television on, on the Sabbath, and the fact is, by not having it, they really called on their own resources, more than any other day of the week. They read more and they spent more time with their friends. Their family was together more because there wasn’t the distraction of television to pull us away from one another during the free hours that we would have and might spend together. So the Sabbath is a great experience in conquering loneliness.




The Sabbath “stresses the holiness in time, to be attached to social events, to learn to consecrate sanctuaries that emerge from the magnificent stream of the year.”




Chapter 3: Ten Steps in Dealing With Loneliness

The Talmud says “There are years which are filled with life; there are years that are empty of life. And a year is an accumulation of moments. The challenge therefore is to make moments meaningful. I am always fascinated by the phrase to kill time. People who are worried about immortality and want to live full long lives yet talk about killing time. The challenge is to make time meaningful and to fill time with meaning. One does that as I say in the last chapter of this little book. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and the single step I say is the beginning of ten major steps that a person can take in dealing with loneliness:

1. Identify, recognize and face loneliness and its nuances for what they are. Don’t deny it, don’t sweep it under a rug, don’t fail to own up to the feeling that you are just lonely. You have to do something about it.




2. Don’t get bogged down on little things. Remember the larger goal. If something is disturbing you, don’t think that it is the end of your life and that’s going to be with you all the time. He that lets the small things of life bind him, leaves the great behind him.

3. Maintain the confidence that you have the power to help yourself. The rabbis of the Midrash suggest that life is like a scale that is evenly balanced between that which will save the world and destroy the world. What you do as an individual makes the difference that tips the scale to save the world or destroy it.




4. Force yourself to do things. Don’t isolate yourself, if you feel low, go out, seek people even if you find it uncomfortable or awkward. Don’t give up, just look for others and being in the presence of others will be helpful. That doesn’t mean what I recommend in five isn’t important.

5. Take time for yourself alone. That is, it is not what I mean by the depressing feeling of loneliness, but take time to be with yourself to reflect what has happened to you and what your experiences are.




6. Don’t make the mistake of thinking the next person has it easier. There’s an interesting Jewish folk saying that suggests that if all the people you know were to put their packs of trouble in the center of a circle, and you were asked to pick up one, you would pick up your own pack of troubles because in comparison to others, you are better off.




7. Remember how much reality is determined by your own outlook on things. The Talmud says: interestingly, that the world one lives in is determined by the type of person one is. A sad person thinks that the world is sad. A person with an optimistic outlook sees promise and hope in the world around him.

8. Don’t expect continuing up hill progress. If you have a bad day, the world isn’t coming to an end. If you had a good day, you haven’t achieved all your goals. Life has its ups and downs.Copyright © 2009 Raphael Rettner D.C. All Rights Reserved. www.chirovideo.com



9. Don’t look into the mirror too often measuring your progress every minute. Be patient, give life a chance to express itself. Then you move forward.




10. Above all, never use the excuse, “What I do doesn’t make a difference.” that you’re an automaton controlled by ropes of forces, people and events that manipulate you, no that isn’t true. You can control the quality of life that you live and contribute immeasurably to the nature of our total society.

Remember that each person is a partner with God in making his or her life and the world an experience of love, purpose and fulfillment. You have been given the freedom and power, as told we’re told in the book of Deuteronomy, to choose life. Add years to your life by giving direction to your daily existence.




Chapter 4: Quotations Of Great Insight

The concluding chapter has forethoughts, quotations from different people, gives us insight into loneliness. These are from notes that I gathered while preparing the first part of the book.

Dag Hammershold- “Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for.”




Sir Philip Sidney-“They are never alone that are accompanied with noble thoughts.”

Ciscero –“There is no grief which time does not soften.”




Samuel Johnson-”Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties....To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity.”

Mark Van Doren, former teacher of mine....“That’s one of the troubles with the world today...Everybody thinks that something should be done right away. And that’s not true. Maybe we could do with a lot of non-doing. Maybe the thing to do now is nothing. But you know, the journalists and the people who, they say, control public opinion are always calling upon something to be done. I wish we could call a moratorium upon actions for the next ten years, then we might be saved.”




Finally, John F. Kennedy-”Man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings




Chapter 9 Conclusion:

You are not alone, the conquest of loneliness. All of us are capable to rise to moments of achievement and creativity. We must make the effort.




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