Last summer, when I was suicidally depressed (not kidding) I had a friend who was instrumental in saving my life.

Jack had just come into a lot of money several months earlier from selling his huge loft apartment in SoHo, NYC, and, from his new permanent home in Israel, called me one evening to plead with me, “Just go somewhere! Get completely away from your environment for a week. I’ll pay for it! Anywhere in the world, you just tell me, and I’ll pay for your airfare and hotel.”

For almost two weeks I contemplated his offer. I didn’t think there was any way I could let him spend that kind of money on me. Then I realized he was right—I had to do something drastic or I was going to kill myself!

I spent another week fantasizing about escapes to exotic beach paradises. I looked on the internet for all the possibilities—Bali, Tahiti, Hawaii, Thailand, on and on.

In the end I picked my favorite sentimental spot from childhood—Miami Beach. And literally from the moment I got off the plane at Miami International and then was waiting outside for a rental car shuttle (Jack also threw in a compact-economy vehicle for me to drive to Key West) I felt the weight start to lift.

Being at the ocean swimming and lying on the beach for seven straight days, all the while traipsing around all the old familiar landmarks—especially the ones dating from my childhood when our family made annual summer car treks from Ohio to Miami—I was able to pull out of the worst of it and it marked the beginning of my recovery.

*****

This past Sunday, after leaving an unusual afternoon church meeting, I got an immediate phone call from a dear friend (who’d been trying to reach me “live” all day) informing me that Jack died of a massive heart attack Saturday evening while carrying a load of heavy groceries and mail up a staircase. He was 70 years old but in perfect physical shape and without any outstanding health problems.

Needless to say, I am going through the shock and grief of his being gone. He was unsaved and as much as I tried over the years to get him to see the truth, in the end I can’t say I got anywhere with him in that regard. He would always tell me in one way or another, “I don’t have what you have. It’s just not there.” I’m almost certain he won’t be in heaven.

Jack had a very unusual story in that his mother had him out of wedlock and gave him up for adoption. He was adopted by a Jewish couple who raised him as an Orthodox Jew. He only learned in his late 30s, through an investigative search, that his real mother was a Norwegian gentile from a little town in Minnesota. She had come to Chicago for his birth to avoid anyone knowing about her pregnancy and he was delivered in a Salvation Army facility designed for such mothers.

Because I am a journalist, Jack once suggested to me in 2003 that I might enjoy interviewing his adoptive mother in Los Angeles. Ida was 96 and close to death, living in a Jewish retirement center.

I kept the subsequent story I wrote on her, which was posted to a former website of mine called Freespoken.com, and thought it might be enjoyable to re-post today for others to read, especially for those of my friends who also knew Jack and are going through the same emotions I am right now. So, here it is, along with another article I wrote on Bertrand Russell as sort of a complement piece:

*****

Ida at the End of 96 Years

When I called 96-year-old Ida Lampert just before Christmas to interview her for my website, neither one of us had any idea it would be one of her last conversations. As it turned out, she suffered a massive stroke only a few days later and died shortly thereafter.

The news shocked me even though Ida told me more than once during our half-hour conversation that she felt she was close to death and said there were many mornings she was surprised to wake up.

“I often feel, ‘This is the day,’ “ she admitted to me. “Some times I don’t even hurt, but there’s a sad feeling, that I can tell you. I don’t know if all the older people feel that way. Well, you know, all of us are different, so naturally our feelings are different too. I often feel, ‘This is the day,’ but I’m not scared. The reason I’m not scared is because I know this is it--you can’t live forever!”

The morning I talked to Ida from her room at an assisted living facility in Los Angeles, she was as sharp and lively as anyone I know as she graciously answered my questions on everything from what it’s like to live so long to whether she thought the world was collapsing. I had never spoken to her before and she was recommended to me as a good interviewee by her son, who lives in New York.

“You mean how did I feel after it happened,” she responded when I asked for her reaction to 9/11 events. “Well, to tell you the truth, I almost collapsed. To begin with, the U.S. to us means everything. When we came here, we had it hard and we went through a lot in the U.S. We had a big depression. We had a couple of wars. Russia didn’t mean anything to us when we came here because we were so glad to leave and we were so happy to come to the U.S. that no matter how hard we had it here we were very happy.”

Ida was 16 years old when she, along with her mother and two sisters, came to the U.S. via Ellis Island from what was then Bessarabia (an area bordering on the Ukraine and Black Sea which is part of Romania today but had belonged to Russia and was still under the control of Czar Nicholai at Ida’s birth). Her father had died years earlier of an illness. Ida explained, “In Russia, you know, they get sick, they die, and at that time, that was 80-some years ago.”

The family settled in Chicago, where several relatives had already immigrated, and Ida married at age 19. Her husband had escaped Russia as a teenager when the army tried to draft him for service in the Russian Revolution of 1917. Basically, he hit a guard on the head, ran away and eventually found exile in France before a relative sponsored him to come to the U.S.

Ida was primarily a homemaker but she worked for awhile as a sales person at a clothing store on the Southwest Side of Chicago. In 1954, she and her husband, a professional house painter, and 16-year-old son moved to Los Angeles.

In L.A., she worked part-time for awhile as a clerk at Smith’s Hardware, a famous hardware store on Sunset Boulevard. She even tells a funny anecdote about how she advised the store owner he should shoo out a very disheveled, unkempt man aimlessly weaving the aisles, and it turned out to be actor Charles Laughton.

For many years, Ida, an Orthodox Jew, volunteered at her local synagogue., Etz Jacob Synagogue, and served as treasurer, then secretary and president. Her husband volunteered his services on Bingo Nights and was known as Bingo Louie.

Ida lived alone for 16 years after her husband died in 1987. She had to give up her home in 1995 after she was diagnosed with the eye disease, Macular Degeneration, and could not see well enough to maintain an independent lifestyle.

“When I was 90 I was still very active, really like a young person, but within the last six years I sort of went down hill quite a bit,” she told me with a laugh. “It’s getting to me. Old age is getting to me. When I tell that to my son, he says, ‘Ma, you’re old already!’ “

Due to her worsening eye disease, Ida couldn’t even see to dial her telephone the last year of her life.

“Since I got older, at this age, I can’t see and I can’t read--I can only listen to the news--so I think,” she explained to me. “And this is what I think: ‘Just what’s the purpose of life?!’ I haven’t come to any conclusion. I often think, ‘What words of wisdom can I leave to my own people,’ and I can’t find any!”

When I asked her why she thought she, of all people, was still around to see 96, she answered, “You know, many times I’ve wondered the same thing--and I do thank God for letting me live this long--but it’s no big deal that He should have picked me. Sometimes a person does so much for humanity--a lot of good things for the world--but I did nothing for the world. I didn’t accomplish too much. I was very nice to people, but people were very nice to me. I was good with my family but that was nothing big. It was nothing different than what any ordinary person would do.”

Ida admitted life since 9/11 has been “much different than all the years I lived through. Even though we had very hard times, we never had this insecure feeling. We were never hit in our own country.”

Her concern, she said, was for the harmful impact recent events would have on young people’s outlook about their future: “I feel so bad for the young people that I cannot begin to tell you,” she said. “To live in fear like this is a terrible thing. It’s almost like the world is coming to an end. That’s the feeling for the young people. But don’t feel that way, honey, because that is history. We all went through this, all the human beings went through it one time or another. Even those that had it real assured that they were kings and everything, they went down too. That’s the way.”

After a pause but without any prompting from me, Ida continued: “I’ll tell you what my thoughts are—what is the world all about?! Since the beginning of life, of history, there are fights. If it’s not for religion, it’s for something else, but never will you have real peace. That’s why I feel so bad for the young people because we’ve had it good since the 1950s and ’60s. The young people did not have to worry for anything. If they wanted a job, they could get it. Especially in the U.S., it was absolutely wonderful. But now it’s really the reality of what the people in Europe went through all of the time. I feel very bad for the young people because they did not have real hardships like they have in Europe, so it’s so much harder for them. But things will straighten out. So you see, this is what life’s all about. You just live it--this is what it is.”

Listening to Ida, there was a real sense she didn’t fear anything about her own well-being. I asked her whether her age and closeness to death had affected her thoughts about God.

She only answered by saying, “As far as praying to God, I do the same praying—not any more, not any less. It didn’t change much. I often think, I’m not more religious and I’m not less religious. I do it in my own way. I thank God for a lot of things.”

Ida was the one to end our conversation, signaling she was ready to get off the phone by saying, “Well, it was very nice talking to you.”

Just a minute beforehand she had revealed to me what she said was her biggest worry. “The thing that worries me the most,” she said, “is there should be an Israel. I tell you, that’s my biggest worry.”

I simply said in response, “Oh, Israel will exist, otherwise the Bible is wrong.”

*****

Editor’s Note:

Life is very strange the way it can lull you into a sense of permanency when there is none. When I talked to Ida I had no real sense—and I’m sure she didn’t either--that she was on the absolute edge of death.

The whole thing reminded me of the last real conversation I had with my dad in October, 2001. We had one of our typical father-daughter phone conversations that covered everything from his latest dieting efforts to the Anthrax Scare hitting New York.

That same night, unbeknownst to me, he fell in his home and broke his hip.

The next I know he’s in intensive care just before a scheduled hip replacement surgery. He died hours later of “massive internal hemorrhaging” due to an undetected broken blood vessel in his stomach.

When I talked to Ida, the statement she made that struck me the most—and, surprisingly, she directed it at me personally--is how young people shouldn’t think the world is coming to end because of all the current turmoil.

Between 9/11 and my father’s very unexpected death the next month, I am someone who’s spent a great deal of time the past year-and-a-half thinking about my own mortality.

Overall, I think it’s been positive because I am concentrating more on what I hope to be before I die, rather than just living for the time-being.

As Cat Stevens’ “Oh, Very Young” song goes, “You’re only dancing on this earth for a short while.” No one knows when there time is up. Anyone who thinks they always have tomorrow to figure out their standing with God, is taking a gamble.

As a result of Ida’s expressed concern about Israel’s future, I purchased a set of tapes from my church on the subject, produced the year Israel celebrated its 50^th anniversary.

Here is part of what my pastor said in one of his sermons on the matter:

“The claims and the counter-claims regarding Israel all focus on the possession of the land of Palestine. When the Romans deported Israel in 70 A.D., and up to about 135 A.D., they renamed that part of the world Palestine. The issue has been who gets the land—who gets the property? Who gets to live in that little piece of land?

“The world looks at it as just an economic conflict—it’s just a political issue, a social issue—but there’s really something far deeper than that. There’s a spiritual issue going on there and the real question that’s at stake is, ‘Who is God?’

“Is God the god of the Bible or is God the god of the Koran? Is He the God of the ‘Word of God’ or is He ‘Allah’ of the Muslim faith?

“Simply put, both ‘gods’ claim the land--both claim it to be given to their descendants--and the way that conflict will resolve itself is going to be based upon which one is God. Is ‘Jehovah God’ God or is ‘Allah the moon god’ God?

“By the way, Allah is a pagan god--the moon god in pagan history goes as far back as Egypt and Babel. The reason they use the crescent moon as their symbol and so forth is that is the symbol of their god. Just as Jesus Christ is said to be the S-U-N (‘My name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings’--Malachi 4:2) there is a counterfeit of that. “But the moon god, that’s who Allah is--that’s where the term ‘Allah’ comes from.

“That’s where a lot of the theology and so forth that’s involved with Islam comes from. What you’re witnessing is this conflict—if Allah’s so-called ‘Nation of Islam’ succeeds in wresting the land of Israel from the Jewish people, the prophecies of the Bible will have failed. The Bible will be invalidated and the Koran will be verified as the true word of God. That’s what the real conflict’s about.”

*****

Bertrand Russell as the Atheist

At a funeral mass for a friend two weeks ago the priest told the crowd he pitied people who did not believe in the gift of eternal life as it is offered in the New Testament.

Even though I knew what he meant, the use of the word “pity” bothered me. It made me think of Mr. T’s trademark line, “I pity the poor fool…”

If you look up the word “pity” in the dictionary, it is first defined as “compassion for suffering,” but its second reference is, “concern or regret for one considered inferior or less favored; condescending sympathy.”

Myself, I know I would never want anyone to say they pitied me.

Not too long ago I received an email from an acquaintance in Chicago that included this line from Bertrand Russell: “Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life--the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.”

“What are yours?” the emailer asked, informing me, “Mine are as Honorable Russell’s.”

I wrote back that I believed the desire for love is universal among men. So is the quest for knowledge, even if it is knowledge of things not deemed worthy of study by others.

As for “unbearable pity,” I don’t buy it. Unbearable means just what it says.

Would any of us really be able to live our lives—eating, drinking, sleeping, making money, spending money, hanging out in front of the TV with a bag of chips--if we were overcome by the suffering of even one individual?

When Jesus Christ exhorted people to “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” he was talking about caring about someone else’s well-being the same as we do our own. He didn’t mean for anyone to be motivated out of pity. Pity feeds the ego.

As the Apostle Paul says in Philemon 2:3-5, “Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves. Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others. Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.”

Love is not something to long for from others, it something to manifest from within. In this sense, real love does not seek any payoff. There is no disappointment associated with it. The idea is, how can I be taken advantage of if all I want to do is give?

*****

Service Builds the Muscle

While in Washington, D.C. last spring, I saved a long profile in the Washington Post on John Bridgeland, a 41-year-old Bush aide in charge of the USA Freedom Corps of citizen-volunteers. Bridgeland was quoted as saying, “How do you instill in younger generations, and in senior Americans, who are entering retirement, the whole mind-set notion of service? What people are finding is that when you get outside your own self-interest, you find what’s really fulfilling in life.”

This is an age-old truth we continually forget as we strive to protect our own security and comfort, not even conscious of the reality that hanging on so tightly to our own little corner prevents us from experiencing the amazing emotional growth of giving love away. Love is not something to try and stake claim to from a position of scarcity, but it is something to give freely from a position of abundance.

“But this I say, He which soweth sparingly shall reap also sparingly; and he which soweth bountifully shall reap also bountifully,” it says in II Corinthians 9:6-7.

The truth of love as it is laid out in the Bible is about being something for someone else for what it can give the other person, knowing we are nothing without our ability to love another.

“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal,” Paul writes in I Corinthians 13:1. “{2] And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.

[3] And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.
[4] Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,
[5] Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;
[6] Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;
[7] Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.”

What is very interesting to note is that Russell, regarded as one of the 20^th Century’s two or three major philosophers and a huge guru for young people in the ’60s who looked to him for moral leadership, once admitted, “It is only intellect that keeps me sane; perhaps this makes me overvalue intellect against feeling.”

This says to me he was primarily interested, not in the suffering of mankind, but what was going on inside his own head, placing his faith solely in his abilities of reason.

*****

Russell on his Atheism

Russell was a very vocal, self-proclaimed atheist who once made the argument that having faith in Jesus Christ was harmful. He said, “Christians hold that their faith does good, but other faiths do harm…What I wish to maintain is that ALL faiths do harm. We may define faith as a firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. When there is evidence, no one speaks of faith. We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence…We are told that faith could remove mountains, but no one believed it; we are now told that the atomic bomb can remove mountains, and everyone believes it.”

Obviously Russell does not understand the most basic premise for the Christian faith: God demands faith in order for belief in Him—which includes belief in His Son--to become real.

As it says in Hebrews 11:1: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen…

Hebrews 11: 6-7 clearly explains, “But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him. By faith Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house; by the which he condemned the world, and became heir of the righteousness which is by faith.”

The fact Russell favors evidence over faith could very well explain his overwhelming longing for love, as he describes it. Love is based on faith, not evidence, otherwise it is not real. It is not dependant on proof, including proof of being reciprocated by the receiver of it.

The Bible clearly tells us our ability to love comes from God and God alone, which would present a real problem for an atheist who has chosen to reject God’s love.

I John 4:7-12 explains, “love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.
[8] He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.
[9] In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him.
[10] Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
[11] Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.
[12] No man hath seen God at any time. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us.”

How can loving one another as God loved us be harmful, as Russell argues? It clearly doesn’t follow.