There is apparently no social or political remedy for the simplest, most common suffering. One can try to do away with the master-slave relationship in the outward, material realms. One can put an end to hunger, bloodshed, and the grosser forms of cruelty. I am proud of the fact that we have fought to accomplish these things and have proved that the battle is not hopeless. So far, so good. But that’s where the trouble begins.

I say “the battle”—yet as soon as I say it, I sense, staring down at me through the thin curtain of ideology, the savage peaks of a suffering far more primeval. The very suffering that drives all of us to look constantly for battlefields, for “challenges,” to fight, to defeat, to win. How shall we tame the ancient instinct to seize, in Rimona’s words, a spear or a sword and run after an antelope and stalk it, hunt it, kill it, and then celebrate the killing? What can we do against the weariness of heart, the subtle, cunning cruelty which is not openly sadistic and can even masquerade as the most reasonable and “constructive” of behaviors? What shall we say in the face of the secret brutishness lurking within each of us, what our forefathers called the uncircumcised heart and what even a logical-minded, self-disciplined, monkish, musical village priest like myself sometimes discovers in his own soul? With what weapon can we repel this interior wilderness? How can we overcome our dark desires to dominate others, to humiliate them, to subjugate them, to make them dependent on us, to chain and enslave them with the gossamer threads of guilt, shame, and even gratitude?

I have just reread my last few lines. “With what weapon can we repel?” “How can we overcome?” Even as I seek to avoid the horror, the horror is infecting my own way of speaking. To repel. To overcome.

I am seized by fear and trembling.