Confessions of a Pharisee

 

Underlining the Christian doctrine of depravity are the simultaneous notions that one is a sinner and that it does not matter because God has already forgiven you. For some mysterious reason, God loves you despite your sins. In fact, God has chosen you because he desires to save the worst of sinners. You can take comfort in the fact that you are not capable of being truly righteous as that would open the door to God actually expecting you to live up to that standard. An advantage of this worldview is that it allows a person to be honest about their sins. As long as you try to “earn” salvation by being a “good person,” you fall into the trap of the theological Pharisee, who believes that they are righteous or at least “better” than those “sinners” out there. To be clear, nothing that I say should be taken as a criticism of historical Pharisees, who were a Second Temple-era religious/political faction.  

The Pharisaic attitude inevitably leads to hypocrisy. In order to claim that you are a righteous person, you need to put one’s thumb on the moral scales and claim that the same action when done by you is a minor failing at best while a demonstration of the utmost depravity when committed by others. Even the exceptionally pious person does not escape. The very thought that one is pious is a grievous blasphemy as it credits man with the righteousness that belongs to God alone. This naturally creates its own hypocritical defense mechanism. It is the other people who are such Pharisees and think that they are righteous. By contrast, I only act from pure motives.

Another manifestation of the Pharisee mindset is an inability to forgive others. If one’s claim to having a connection to God is dependent upon being righteous or at least better than other people, then others must be held to their sins. If I am going to make it into heaven, it is going to be because others have been sacrificed as scapegoats on my behalf. They were the ones who caused and are therefore responsible for any sins that I might have appeared to have committed. One thinks of Eve blaming the snake and Adam blaming Eve. At the very least, their relative wickedness should mean that God should count me as righteous in my generation. One thinks of Noah, who was righteous relative to everyone else in the flood generation. He built an ark for himself and his family and shut the door on everyone else. This is in contrast to Abraham who prayed for the sinners of Sodom.

Considering this, I would like to confess to being a Pharisee. As the son of a rabbi, I was raised to assume that I was a good person. My father praised me for going to synagogue early and staying for the entire 2.5-hour service. The logical conclusion of my father loving me was that God loved me as well. I was more observant than the other kids in my class, so I was better than them. Of course, I knew of kids in larger Jewish communities who did not watch television but those were crazed fanatics.  

This religious pride, a far greater sin than any ham sandwich, had its parallel in my intellectual pride. My mother praised me for my reading and my teachers seemed to appreciate how I was able to talk about all sorts of historical facts. It was this academic pride that got me into trouble when I went away to middle school in Pittsburgh. The kids in Columbus had grown up with me and accepted me as the oddball rabbi’s kid. My new classmates simply saw me as someone socially isolated and insufferably full of myself and, therefore, an easy target for bullying. My response to this bullying was to call them bozos and sink further into myself. Not only was I religious and smart, but I was also the victim of all of these lesser people.

There is an irony to believing that you are religious and smart and then building your self-esteem around these assumptions. You find yourself simultaneously needing to believe these things and fighting off doubts. It is hard to ignore all the evidence that one is neither a saint nor a genius but if I am not religious and smart then what am I? One of the implications of this dilemma is that I am terrible at accepting criticism. I cannot disassociate the particular points being made with the macro question of whether I am special. As such, I have a compulsive need to respond to even minor criticisms. To make matters worse, I am smart enough to be a decent lawyer for myself and come up with reasons why I am right even as I lack the far more important good sense to let certain issues lie.  

When my keen intellect is not devoted to defending myself, it seeks out reasons to find fault with others and never forgive them. I bear grudges against people who did things to me years ago, whether ex-girlfriends or academic advisers. As readers of C. S. Lewis’ Great Divorce can appreciate, I created a hell for myself that was locked from the inside. The more I suffered for what they did to me the more I was the righteous martyr and they were my sinful tormentors. The fact that my life did not play out as a suitable theodicy narrative and the "villains" got to go on with their lives while ignoring me made me feel even more depressed. This, in turn, fed a negative emotional cycle. I needed to cling to the belief that they would get what was coming to them and I would be vindicated as their moral superior. As such, I could never forgive them as long as they refused to come to me on bended knee and ask for forgiveness, acknowledging my moral superiority. To forgive them would mean to throw away my heavenly trump card as the victim of such horrors, which should force even God to deem me righteous.

I am blessed to have friends and family who love me despite my flaws. If they can love me, despite my flaws, one can hope that God loves me and has forgiven my sins. If God is willing to forgive the worst of sinners, perhaps that includes the most self-righteous of Pharisees. 

Keeping Away from the Bible: How Not to Defend Israel

Elliot Resnick is the editor of the Jewish Press (the Jewish Depressed, as I used to refer to it when discussing it with my grandfather of blessed memory). We both attended the Chabad yeshiva in Pittsburgh. Here, on the Tom Woods Show, he debates Gene Epstein over the question of Israel with Resnick taking the pro-Israel position. As someone who considers himself to be pro-Israel and an observant Jew, I think Resnick absolutely blew this debate. He lost me in the first few minutes when he decided to lead by arguing from the Bible. And this is on a libertarian show. If there is a context in which religion is going to be less relevant even among people who are serious about religion, I am hard-pressed to think of one.

There are good reasons to actively avoid even bringing up the Bible when defending Israel as it implies that there are no good secular liberal and even libertarian arguments to be made. This allows opponents of Israel to accuse us of "Israeling their juice."





In truth, even from a biblical perspective, one is on weak ground to make any political argument that Jews have a right to the land. A critical part of the larger biblical narrative is that the same God, who gave us the land and allowed us to slaughter the Canaanites also kicked us out of the land. The very circumstances under which allowed the Israelites to enter the land in the first place ultimately led to our own exile when we failed to live up to God's demands. Furthermore, we have the example of Abraham, who bought the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron from Ephron. If God's direct promise to Abraham did not get him out of having to pay money to the inhabitants, how much more so do we not have the right to take anything from non-Jews living currently living in Israel at gunpoint.

In general, it is important to keep in mind when reading the Old Testament that it is a running dialogue between ethno-supremacy and its subversion. Israel is both the honored chosen people of God and the cursed people who violated his commandments. God is both the tribal god of Israel and the God of the entire world who loves everyone equally. Just as Christianity requires its paradox in the form of Jesus being both God and man, Judaism needs its paradox of being both parochial and universalistic. To resolve the paradox may be reasonable but ultimately it would destroy the religion.

The Bible can serve a purpose in defending Israel in terms of a larger narrative. Consider the issue from the opposing perspective. The whole point of inventing a Palestinian people was to give them a narrative. As long as the Palestinians are just Arabs who lost property in 1948 and became refugees, they will get very little sympathy even from libertarians. Such Arabs can get in line behind millions of other people who were chased from their land in the aftermath of World War II. Being in favor of private property does not mean that you are going to even try to rectify historical injustices. Even today, if the Palestinians are just Arabs, what is so wrong with simply paying them off and shipping them to other Arab countries, particularly if that could solve the Arab-Israel conflict?

The moment you have a Palestinian people, everything changes. Now the Israeli War of Independence did not simply have the unfortunate side effect of uprooting some innocent civilians for which Israel should perhaps pay reparations. There was a people that were uprooted and a culture destroyed. Money cannot solve this problem. The only solution would be for this people to be reconstituted upon their land. If that means that the current Jewish residents might have to be moved out of the houses that they are currently living in, so be it. Until this happens, the world is a poorer place for the lack of this Palestinian culture. As such, all right-minded people, even those with no connection to either Arabs or Palestinians should care about this issue and work for justice for the Palestinian people.

Part of the reason why the Arabs needed to do this was to counter the fact that the Israelis already had a narrative and it behooves us to remember it. Jews were not simply Europeans who showed up in Palestine at the end of the nineteenth century. They were natives of this land going back to biblical times. Note that one does not have to be any kind of religious fundamentalist to accept the Bible as evidence that Jews lived in Israel during antiquity. While this does not give Jews the right to kick anyone off of their land, it does give a reason for the wider world to care about Zionism. You do not have to be Jewish to be inspired by this narrative of a people who kept their culture without the aid of a political state and then, after two-thousand years, re-established that state. If that state were to be abolished and those people had to leave their homes, even if they were paid off and are now living in comfort in New York and Los Angeles, that would still be a tragedy.

Even though this kind of biblical argument has some validity to it, it should only be used to counter Palestinian arguments that they are a people and that Jews are simply European colonists. One should not lead with this argument. National narratives, while they may be useful as a way to inspire people, do not offer a productive means of working toward practical solutions. Finally, there is no reason to bring it up within a libertarian context. A critical aspect of libertarianism is the rejection of national narratives as having any political relevance. The only meaningful political actor is the individual property owner with rights and the ability to enter into social contracts with other property owners.

From Conservatism to Libertarianism: My Personal Journey (Part I)

While there can be left and right-libertarians, most libertarians lean conservative as exemplified by the Republican strategy, previously discussed. Libertarians pay a price for this as it boxes us in. This is particularly problematic in a two-party system like the United States where the Libertarian Party has proven itself unable to get passed the Republican charge that they only serve to throw elections to the Democrats. The reverse side of this argument is that liberals charge us with being crypto-conservatives, attempting to smuggle in conservatism, Trojan Horse style, in a way that might sound acceptable to a liberal audience. For example, this idea is at the core of Nancy MacLean’s attempt to connect James Buchanan and the Koch brothers to segregationists.  

Before we can consider solutions to get us out of this political box, it is important to understand why most libertarians lean conservative. I suspect that many libertarians started off as conservatives, who then turned to libertarianism less because they stopped believing in conservatism but because they came to the recognition that, in the normal course of events, conservatism was unlikely to win culturally and, without that, all political victories would prove short-term and ultimately hollow. I certainly fit into this category and I am curious as to how common my experience is. Granted that some of the particulars are going to be more relevant to American Orthodox Jews growing up in the 1990s and coming of age with 9/11. Note that what I am about to say is my attempt to describe my political beliefs as a teenager and not what I currently believe. If you have not changed your mind about a few things since you were a teenager then I suggest that you have not been thinking very hard. 

As with most Orthodox Jews, my politics was heavily influenced by events in Israel. For me, this meant a growing anger as Oslo failed, oddly enough, less against the Arabs but against the left as a whole. Liberals like Bill Clinton and Yitzhak Rabin had deliberately betrayed us, getting people killed, in order so that they could claim a moral high ground for themselves as “peacemakers” while denigrating those of us who actually cared about human life as racists and haters. I am ashamed to admit it, but my twelve-year old self was actually happy when he heard that Rabin was assassinated. (I was at Shalos Seudos at Keser Torah in Pittsburgh at the time.) I thought the man got what he deserved.

The other issue I cared about as an Orthodox kid was public schooling. Liberals made my parents pay for public schools designed to preach leftism as well as pay my religious schooling, leading to our financial struggles. Liberals did not really care about tolerating the non-rich who followed alternative lifestyles. On the contrary, they sought to bankrupt anyone who did not follow their line. These two issues primed me to be open to right-wing talk radio.  

Ironically enough, you can blame Al Franken for my discovery of Rush Limbaugh. I read Franken’s Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and thought that he was being so over the top that I should find out about this Limbaugh person for myself so I read two of Limbaugh’s books, The Way Things Ought to Be and See I Told You So. This led me to occasionally listen to his show during lunch and on Fridays while preparing for Shabbos. I was never any kind of three hours a day listener but I found Limbaugh to be amusing in short doses.

Bryan Caplan argues that leftists are anti-market and rightists hate the left and this was certainly true of me. What attracted me to Limbaugh was not his advocacy of markets. In fact, at this point in my life, I was actually attracted to Marxism. Part of it was being able to stick the word “bourgeoise” into every conversation but there was also this sense of being part of a revolution. Granted, my version of the workers of the world overthrowing the bourgeois (don't you just love saying that word) capitalists tended to be more bottom-up with the party creating a counter-economic system rendering the seizure of government irrelevant. Also, my version of the party would be animated by the “social justice” side of the Old Testament. In fact, I used Isaiah 11:4 as my yearbook quote. 

    

I cannot recall hearing from Limbaugh much in the way of any kind of principled defense of markets beyond saying that liberal plans for expanding government were bad. The closest he came to d’Anconia’s money speech was offering listeners a money clip to remind them that it is their money and they are allowed to keep it. The essence of the Limbaugh narrative was that we could stick it to those mean liberals (like Franken), who wanted to order us around and would hypocritically call us greedy bigots if we objected. What was critical here was a feeling that, by tuning in, one was taking part in an unfolding revolution. Limbaugh implicitly promised us that very soon the liberals, with their bankrupt ideology, would collapse and we would take back America.

It was through Rush Limbaugh that I discovered the person, who most influenced my conservative self, Sean Hannity. I first heard Hannity when he subbed for Limbaugh during the 2000 Republican primaries. (I remember this because I was a strong supporter of the late Sen. John McCain, who Hannity was quite critical of.) Once he got his own show, I took to listening to him on a regular basis. This may sound funny today but I will contend that Hannity, at that time, was a much more moderate figure than he is today. In fact, what attracted me to Hannity over Limbaugh was the relative lack of personal ego and hate. Limbaugh was all about himself taking on the liberal media. Hannity was about how we could join together to defeat the liberals and build a better America.

Into the mix of talk-radio, my high school self also encountered J. S. Mill’s On Liberty. Mill enchanted me with a dream of tolerance that people could be left to pursue their own good in their own way. For me, this had nothing to do with the left nor did it contradict my conservatism. It was the left who was trying to interfere with my life. One effect of Mill on my thinking was that by the time I was in college, even as I still identified as a conservative, I came to support the legalization of drugs and prostitution. Since these issues were so outside the political mainstream of either party, it had little effect on my larger political narrative. We conservatives were so going to succeed at spiritually reforming this country that we would not even need such petty laws anymore.   

Thoughts for the Super Bowl: Playing According to Rules in Sports and in Life

Only a few more hours until the Super bowl begins and my beloved Pittsburgh Steelers will play the Greenbay Packers. I am not going to any Super Bowl parties, but will be at home in Columbus armed with plenty of food and alcohol. I will have my laptop on so readers should feel free to twitter  me. In the meantime I thought I would take the moment to speak about rules, both in sports and in life.

As an Asperger I struggle in social situations in large part because the only way I know how to deal with people is through clearly defined sets of rules. Other people always seem to be able to get away with general appeals to fairness and decency, which, not surprisingly, always ends with other people being able to do whatever they want and me being left to pay the bill. One of the reasons why I like sports so much, even if I personally was never any good at them, is because sports are a realm of human interaction defined solely by rules with no pretension of there being anything else. In a sport like football there are two teams trying to score more points than the other. After four quarters of fifteen minutes one team will win and the other will lose. (Unless there is a tie at which point the game goes into overtime.)


Whether or not Steeler and Packer fans like each other today, they all agree about the rules of the game. You score points by moving the ball down the field to score a touchdown or a field goal. You have four downs to move the ball ten yards or the ball is turned over. A catch is a catch, a fumble is a fumble and a sack is a sack. This goes for the formal rules on the playing field as well as the more informal rules of sportsmanship. There are no pretensions of vague pleas to socially acceptable behavior and allowing the most deserving to win. I find a comfort in these hard fixed laws, even when they do not go my way.

 

I have very strong memories of the first Steeler AFC championship game I ever saw. I got up that morning in January 1995 convinced that the Steelers were going to crush the San Diego Chargers and head to their first Super Bowl in my lifetime. Things did not go as planned. After jumping out to a 13-3 lead, the Steelers gave up two touchdowns in the second half. In the closing minutes of the game they drove down the field setting up a fourth and goal at the Charger three yard line. Neil O’Donnell’s pass was stuffed on the goal line and that was the end of the game. How could it be that my Steelers had lost and all those months of playing a great season had come to naught? Should not there be one final thing to be done to give the Steelers and fans like myself what we “deserved?”

The next year, the Steelers made it to the Super Bowl to play the Dallas Cowboys. No one gave the Steelers much of a chance, but, down throughout the game, they found themselves, in the final minutes down only 20-17. At which point Neil O'Donnel threw an interception and the Cowboys won 27-17.

When I was in eighth grade at the Lubavitch school in Pittsburgh, I competed in a contest in Jewish law across the Lubavitch school system in North America. I was one of four students from the school selected to go to Toronto to compete in the championship, my own personal Super Bowl I thought. The first part of the championship was a written multiple choice exam held Saturday night. As I am sure has happened to many of my readers, after going through the exam once I went back and changed several of the answers that I was not sure about only to find out later that I was right the first time. The top third of contestants got to go on to a final oral round. I was the one person from the Pittsburgh team who did not make the cut. After the names were read out, our school principal, who traveled to Toronto with us, came over to me to congratulate me for a good effort. As he walked away from me to watch the finals, in my mind I was calling out to him: "is there not something you can do, some way you can pull some strings to let me also stand in the finals?"     

Of course the rules of the game have also given me some moments of victory such as in the Super Bowl two years ago, when, down 23-20 against the Arizona Cardinals, Ben Roethlisberger threw one of the most incredible touchdown passes in Super Bowl history to Santonio Holmes.

Sorry Cardinal fans, Holmes feet were down and in. The Steelers won their sixth Super Bowl, 27-23.




Hopefully this Super Bowl, Roethlisberger will produce another incredible pass, this time perhaps to Hines Ward or Michael Wallace, to win a seventh Super Bowl. But if he comes up short like Neil O’Donnell then so be it; that is how the game is played. I only wish that people could be honest with themselves and recognize that life must also be played by rules through both winning and losing.

A Slightly Polemical Discourse Which I, For Good Reason, Left Out of My Eulogy for My Grandfather.

Last November there was a major dinner in honor of my grandfather, Rabbi Yitzchak Chinn of Blessed Memory. The dinner was held in a hotel in downtown Pittsburgh and people came from across the country to pay their respects to my grandfather. In attendance were many city officials and civic leaders, the vast majority of whom were not Jewish. In short, it was a beautiful though not the sort of event you would expect to be hosted for an Orthodox rabbi who spent his life avoiding the spotlight. The guest speaker for this event was Rabbi Shmuel Kamenetsky. This was a great honor as Rabbi Kamenetsky is the head of a prominent Yeshiva in Philadelphia and is recognized as one of the leading Haredi rabbis, a Godel. Also, it should be said that Rabbi Kamenetsky is a busy man so the fact that he came was incredibly kind of him.

Rabbi Kamenetsky gave a speech built around a story found in the Mishna in which Rabbi Yossi ben Kisma refused to live in a specific city, even when offered great wealth, with the reply: "Even if you give me all the silver and gold, precious stones and pearls in the world, I will dwell only in a place of Torah..." (Pirqai Avot 6:9) Rabbi Kamenetsky used this story to talk about building cities devoted to Torah. He spoke well but in Yeshivish English. It was the sort of speech that would not have been out of place in a gathering of Yeshiva students. I suspect that Rabbi Kamenetsky has, in fact, given versions of this same exact speech to his students. Despite Rabbi Kamenetsky’s talent as a speaker, the speech went on for more than a half an hour, stretching my patience.

After the dinner, to my shock, my father commented that the speech was inappropriate considering the audience, as a large percentage of them were not Yeshiva students, not Orthodox and not Jewish. My father then proceeded to commiserate with those people there who were forced to listen to a speech that they could not have understood and must have made absolutely no sense to them. My father is one who will usually go out of the way to defend the Haredi world so to see him be more critical of something than I warmed my heart.

I think this incident is useful in that it demonstrates how clueless Rabbi Kamenetsky is when it comes to the world at large. And Rabbi Kamenetsky is usually held up as an example of a Haredi Rabbi who is moderate and open. He had no idea how to speak to an audience that was not Yeshiva students. I can do a better job at changing how I speak based on my audience and I have Asperger Syndrome. My brain, at a basic level, processes information differently than normal people. The only difficulty Rabbi Kamenetsky has to work under is that he is from a different socio-religious group. Of course, a mark of a great intellect is the ability to cross over such divides and reach people from different backgrounds.

The difference here is that I have spent a lifetime being told that I have to consider the social conventions of the society around me. I may earnestly resist this but, at the end of the day, I do make the attempt to work within societal conventions, particularly when it is clearly in my interest to do so. Rabbi Kamenetsky, it would seem, has spent his life being toadied to by those around him and has never had to seriously consider the general society at all. In the end what we have is a person who, despite his great intellect, is unable to communicate with anyone outside his narrow group even when given the chance.

The Haredi world likes to claim for itself the authority over, not just Orthodox Jewry, but all Jews. They wrap their leaders in the mantel of Gedolei Yisroel, the great ones of Israel. The fact that they claim this should obligate them to at least be able to give a coherent speech in the language of the country they live in that can be understood by the people of the country they live in. Since Rabbi Kamenetsky cannot be bothered to live up to this simple standard why should anyone, Orthodox or not Orthodox, even make the attempt to listen to what he has to say?

A Eulogy For My Grandfather

This past Thursday my grandfather, Rabbi Yitzchak Isaac Chinn, passed away. I had spent the previous evening with my mother, having flown into Silverspring, MD from Columbus, OH for spring break a few days earlier. I was tagging along with my mother as she walked her dog Loki when my father called me with the news. So my mother, my older brother, Gedalya, and I ended up jumping into her minivan and driving out to McKeesport, PA for the funeral service.

My grandfather served as the rabbi of Gemilas Chesed in McKeesport for over fifty years. For those of you who have never heard of McKeesport, it is a little town outside of Pittsburgh, PA. Like much of western Pennsylvania, McKeesport was a steel town until the industry dried up in the 1950s, leaving deserted mills and ghost towns. The Jewish community went the same way as the steel mills; when my father was growing up, McKeesport was a dying Jewish community. The Gemilas Chesed that I knew was one of old men with my grandfather performing far more funerals than bar mitzvahs. Like many similar communities, the young left, and no one came to fill in their place.

One might assume from this that my grandfather failed as a rabbi; nothing could be further from the truth. He built a very vibrant Jewish community. What you must understand is that, while my grandfather’s synagogue was nominally Orthodox, most of his congregants were not fully practicing Jews. Despite this, my grandfather was incredibly successful at getting his congregants, even those who themselves were non-observant, to send their children to Jewish day schools. Many of these children, despite the fact that they did not grow up in observant homes, ended up becoming observant themselves. They went on to move to larger Jewish communities such as Silverspring, Baltimore, New York City, and Lakewood; some even went to Israel. One could say that my grandfather was the victim of his own success. His influence caused people to leave McKeesport. My grandfather may not have built a place of Torah in McKeesport (though there is now a small Yeshiva using the Gemilas Chesed building) but he helped build Torah around the world.

As my grandfather lived out his life in McKeesport and not Lakewood or Boro Park, you may find it hard to believe but my grandfather was Haredi (ultra-Orthodox). He may have been old school Haredi, a breed that, like Gemilas Chesed, is quickly dying out, but Haredi all the same. He went to Yeshiva Torah Vodaath and studied under Rabbi Shraga Feival Mendlowitz of blessed memory. Throughout his life, my grandfather maintained himself as a part of the Haredi community. He was a featured speaker at numerous Agudath Yisroel and other such rabbinical conventions. My grandfather was close to many different rabbinic leaders. When my parents were going out my mother’s father, who is a Klausenberger hasid went to the Klausenberger Rebbe and told him that my mother was going out with a boy named Chinn from McKeesport. The Rebbe’s eyes’ lit up and he replied: “Oh that is Yitzchak Chinn! Yes, that is a good family.” Once, when I was living with my grandparents, the phone rang and I went to pick it up. The person at the other end of the line said: “Hello this is Reb Avraham Pam.” I do not know how many small-town rabbis regularly got personal phone calls from the Rosh Yeshiva of Torah Vodaath.

My grandfather was someone who transcended boundaries. He could befriend rabbis in black hats and he could befriend Jews who drove to synagogue on the Sabbath, he could befriend non-Jews. He possessed the ability to do this because, at his core, he was a gentleman. He treated everyone with respect and dignity; no one was beneath him. My grandfather was a great man in of himself but he was also the product of a certain world. The world of my grandfather was one in which Orthodox Judaism was uncloistered. My grandfather grew up as a good American boy, who happened to wear tzitzit and a kippa. My grandfather could relate to practically anyone who lived in this country because he was an American. The secular world for him was not something that one could just ignore and try to hide from; it was family. One may disagree and fight with family but family is part of you and cannot be ignored.

I am not trying to portray my grandfather as Modern Orthodox. I honestly have no idea what he thought of Yeshiva University, Torah U’Maddah, secular education, rabbinic authority, or evolution. He was not the sort of person who could be baited into such conversations. What he possessed was something that transcended these issues. He showed respect to everyone and was, therefore, someone who could be respected by anyone. This was founded on the fact that he did not see the world in terms of us and them; the world was part of him.

I mourn the loss of my grandfather and I mourn the passing of Gemilas Chesed of McKeesport. They represent the loss of something that we cannot replicate from within ourselves.