Short Interview - Part 1

I am honored to have, returning to 100 Huntley Street after an absence of far too long, maybe 25 years, a man who has written many books, a couple of them here, The Odyssey of a Modern Jew. He's written books like The Holocaust, Where Was God, Reality, and on and on and on. A man who has had an amazing impact worldwide, many, many, many lives. Will you welcome, please, Art Katz. Welcome, Art. Thank you. Thanks for coming back again. It's been too long. It's a privilege. Thank you. All right. I remember your story. We have had something like 14,000 people share their story in the last 25 and a half years on 100 Huntley Street. And I have to confess, I don't remember all the stories, but I remember yours, and we got to hear it again. Powerful story of The Odyssey, Ben Israel, Odyssey of a Modern Jew. That's me. Tell me the story once again. Well, the book is the actual journal that I carried 38 years ago as the hitchhiking, disillusioned, cynical, ex-Marxist, atheist Jew. I had come to a place of disillusionment as a teacher, an idealist, as we Jews often are. My ideologies and philosophies had collapsed, my humanist assumptions. I put a pack on my back. I took a year's leave of absence from the teaching profession, traveling through Europe and the Middle East, seeking to find some philosophical stone that had been left unturned, but instead found that there was a God searching for me. So this is a remarkable book because it's not a retrospective book of a man looking back and remembering. It's the actual day by day account of an atheist being apprehended by God. So it's remarkable in its candor and reality. Where do you start on all those days? Can you pick a day and start somewhere with that story? There's some remarkable episodes of being picked up off the side of the road as a hitchhiker. It's something for a proud man to be dependent on those who will take him up unto themselves in his utter dependency. Traveling for 14 months, I had no alternative but to travel at the bottom of the line. It's something to stand by the side of the road and waiting for someone to stop at a man who is 34 coming on to 35. And a man did stop for me one day. I'd been standing in the drizzling rain for about three hours in Switzerland, watching cars whiz by. I thought, well, so much for my assumption about human brotherhood and mankind and people just looking the other way as if you're non-existent. But a man did stop for me with a brand new car. And my suspicions were aroused when he got out of the car to greet me. Most people would just beckon you to come on. I thought, what's in it for him? Certainly I'm not a comely piece of baggage. And he greeted me and took my filthy wet rucksack and threw it in the back seat of his car without any awareness of what it was doing to his upholstery. He had me to sit on the front seat. And off we drove as if I were doing him the favor and I was the exalted guest. And he turned and he looked at me. I was well past the youth and past the tourist season. He said, why are you traveling like this? I said, I'm a modern man whose life is broken at its foundations. I'm seeking for the deepest answers of life. And before I could finish, and I said, and I'm Jewish. I said, now why did I add that? That surely will turn him off. And I looked cautiously to see his face. And the man was beaming as if the fact that I was a Jew was of uttermost significance and a joy for him. And he insisted that we stop for refreshments at his expense. And it's one of those golden moments that come perhaps once in a man's life where something transcends ordinary conversation. This man had a capacity to draw my heart out remarkably. And I found myself sharing with him the deepest turmoil of my heart, not as a life that had failed, but as a life that had been preeminently successful. But in my success was my failure. I'd come to the end of the line. I was disillusioned about mankind. Ideologies had failed me. Marriage to a German woman had collapsed. My idealism and my assumption about human goodwill and intelligence had collapsed. And I had nothing to offer my students but raise questions I myself could not answer. And so I'm pouring out my soul to this stranger, wondering why I was sharing with him some of the deepest secrets of my life I'd not shared with wife, mother, personal friends. And he just had that capacity. And finally, I just spit it all out. There was nothing more to say. I had come to the very end of myself. And I looked at this man. I thought, what is he going to say to me? I've been an ex-Marxist. I'm a university graduate, well read, traveled, nothing new under the sun. And he said to me in a quiet and assured voice, Artie said, all of this, of course, is in German, do you know what it is that the world needs? I thought, well, this man knows how to ask the questions. I'm dying for what the world needs. And we Jews have been the architect of a world that is dying and collapsing. We have been in the forefront of ideology and thought and speculation. Double dare you to tell me I had my arms folded over my chest with a kind of a defiant expression, waiting to hear what he could say, what new ideology or thought could issue from him that I had not myself sampled or sought. And he said in this quiet voice, Artie said, what the world needs is for men to wash one another's feet. And when I heard that, David, there's no way to explain or to describe the explosive impact of those words in my heart. I continue to sit seemingly unaffected, but my human spirit had fallen out of my body and was whimpering and weeping on the floor because something pierced through. I was the idealist and the ideologist looking for some way to solve the problems of the world. But I had never thought about humility. I had never thought about a spirit of humility of washing one another's feet. And immediately it was like a Eureka that broke up out of my heart. That's it. We don't need ideologies. What have these ideologies obtained for us, but greater rivers of blood and misfortune. And I had a vision of the arrogant art cats as the self-assumed saviors of the world, humbling themselves to wash the feet of those whom they were opposing. As a school teacher, it would have been the administrators. As white, it would be black. As Jews, it would be Gentiles. As Israelis, it would be Palestinians. I just visualized men who are in bitterest opposition to each other, humbling themselves to wash one another's feet. And I knew instantly that without a drop of blood being shed, the world could be changed overnight by such a spirit. But I never thought as a secular Jew in terms of spirit, let alone in terms of humility. And before I could recover from the impact of that one statement, this man was going on sharing with me the gospel of Jesus Christ in German. And I wanted to complain to say, hey, that's not for me. That's for you guys. We have our book. You have your book. But I had no voice. I had lost my voice under the impact of that statement. And so I could not interrupt him. And he went on sharing with me the message of the cross and of faith. And I knew that I was hearing the words of truth in life. But how to reconcile that in the name of Jesus was a conundrum that I could not resolve. When I left that man that day, I wouldn't say that I walked away. I staggered away. I lurched. I was like a drunken sailor. I was impacted. It was a once-in-a-lifetime confrontation with truth. And the remarkable thing was that it issued out of the mouth of a Gentile man who was not prepossessing in his appearance or in any way someone that one would take notice. And yet the words that he spoke were so calculated for my heart. You can't believe how many times I've been back to Switzerland. And every time I go, I'm asking for Edwin. I had his name and address in my wallet, which was pickpocketed in my first day in Egypt. We Jews always suffer misfortune when we go there. And so I had no way to find him, only to ask Christians, do you know of a man who was a bookkeeper, who works for an automobile agency, he sings in the choir, he knows about Duret, the architect, artist, he knows about Jung, the psychologist. He had a breadth of understanding and a spiritual depth. No one has ever been able to direct me to Edwin. So 38 years later, I have to ask, was that a man?