Chapter V

GOD CAN’T KILL ARNOLD

I asked to be disfellowshipped July 19, 1974. When the new ruling for disfellowshipping smoking-offenders came in, two dear women friends got the ax. I took up smoking again purposely to get the ax, and smoked in front of any Witness who came into my home. I was interested to see who in their elaborate spy system would turn me in. It took about four weeks until the committee called me informing me that they knew. In a letter to headquarters, I told them I wanted to be disfellowshipped:

"I no longer consider you my brothers. I have lost respect for a society of people who want to sit in judgment of my conduct-who want to take the splinter out of my eye when their own has a rafter in it. I have lost respect for a society of people who do not understand that it's not what goes into a man's mouth that defiles him, but what comes out.

"Why have you never answered my letters? . . . Hypocritical Phariseeism is rampant. Love of the brothers has become a meaningless word. Meeting attendance has taken precedence over a brother in need. Not celebrating a birthday is a guarantee of spiritual maturity. . . . Does 'coming in The Truth' contribute to a person's sense of well-being and respect? Or are you imposing heavier burdens upon people than those they had in the world ? I bear the scars of my distress: I have twice tried to slash my wrists.

"Where will it stop? Will overeating be a disfellowshipping offense next? The Watchtower and Awake! tell us it is 'a sin' to worry. Is worrying a disfellowshipping offense?

"The Witnesses have lost their joy; they are their own Armageddon, and their own great tribulation." -From a letter sent to me by an excommunicated Witness.

"Disfellowshipping" is the Watchtower Society's term for excommunication.

The Society's governing body appoints, through its branch offices, "'judicial committees" which act on behalf of the entire congregation in hearing cases of "sinful conduct" (such as fornication, adultery, apostasy, smoking) and render decisions that are known as resolutions of expulsion. Trial proceedings are confidential; members of the congregation are not permitted to question the decision of the committee and must comply with the committee’s judgment. If they act in contravention of the committee's ruling, they become candidates for disfellowshipping on the ground of "rebelliousness.” Yet congregation members are often ignorant of the charges that have been brought against a disfellowshipped member and are not allowed to share the testimony that formed the basis of the committee's decision, are not told who it was that instigated the accusations, and further, have no information as to the accused's defense.

It appears now that many Witnesses are disaffected or at least greatly agitated by the Society's procedures for "disfellowshipping." From Manitoba, Canada, thousands of circulars have been sent to Witnesses in Britain, Europe, the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand complaining of alleged injustices by the governing body.

Until 1974, [TW, Aug. 1, 1974] Witnesses were not permitted to exchange a word of greeting with disfellowshipped persons. Obliged to present hard, unyielding faces to sinners, they could not smile at "anti-Christs." A mother whose daughter was disfellowshipped and did not live under her roof could not, under pain of expulsion, speak to her child, unless dire emergency made it necessary. She might be permitted, for example, to inform her daughter of a death in the family, but not to share her grief. Perhaps because the Society has been publicly charged with "spiritual murders" for cutting these people off so brutally, it has softened its policy. Witnesses are now permitted to speak with those disfellowshipped, but not, unless they are elders, on "spiritual matters." Witnesses who have disfellowshipped minor children are told to "use God's word or other publications that discuss the Bible . . . in a corrective manner, not as though having a spiritual 'good time' with such a one in the way they could with the other children." [Ibid.)

While The Watchtower [March 15, 1959] admits that occasional injustices have been perpetrated as a result of prejudicial envy or dislike of the accused, or because of "an incorrect interpretation of Scriptural principles," it does not permit open discussion of disfellowshipping. Nor has it ever publicly apologized to people so victimized. The committee's decision must remain unchallenged; and the disfellowshipped person may not be given any spiritual comfort. Tens of thousands of Witnesses have been disfellowshipped since 1959. A disfellowshipped person must confess publicly, and announce and demonstrate to the satisfaction of the elders his intention to change his ways. (From 1963 to 1973, 36,671 persons were disfellowshipped in the United States. In the same time period, 14,508 persons were reinstated. [TW, Aug. 1, 1974)) In the majority of cases the severity of treatment militates against confession and repentance, and the humiliated disfellowshipped Witness enters despair-or, if he is lucky, freedom.

Indeed, despair is often the mirror image of the Witnesses' certainty.

I have often thought that many Witnesses were ambulatory schizophrenics, that their religion provided them with a vehicle for their craziness, a way to accommodate their fear and loathing of the menacing world. A study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry [June, 1975] tends to confirm this view: John Spencer, writing on "The Mental Health of Jehovah's Witnesses," reports that a study of Witnesses admitted to the Mental Health Services facilities of Western Australia “suggests that members of this section of the community are more likely to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital than the general population. Furthermore, followers of the sect are three times more likely to be diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia and four times more likely from paranoid schizophrenia than the rest of the population."

Spencer says that the principal problem for a researcher "seems to be to decide whether extreme religiosity such as is seen in the so-called ‘neurotic sects' is a symptom of an overt psychiatric disorder, or whether it is a complex defense mechanism against an underlying disorder." His study does not resolve the issue. It "suggests," he says, "that either the Jehovah’s Witnesses sect tends to attract an excess of pre-psychotic individuals who may then break down, or else being a Jehovah's Witness is itself a stress which may precipitate a psychosis. Possibly both of these factors may operate together."

Religiosity, as Jung said, is an extremely varied phenomenon about which it is impossible to generalize. It may, as Jung believed, be a creative expression of man's natural urge to worship; it may be, as Erich Fromm writes, a means of self-preservation, a way of silencing anxiety, a symbolic means of communication. Spencer notes that there is clinical evidence to demonstrate that “even bizarre types of religiosity can be converted into constructive channels when such an intense religious experience is related to unmet psychological needs." He quotes previous studies that indicate that “when an individual's normal devices fail or the integration is threatened, he or she tends to move "towards the more enthusiastic, irrational, fundamental and emotive sects where the psychotic patient may well be supported, protected, and hidden from society."

What happens when a person whose psychological needs have been met by Jehovah's Witnesses is deemed unworthy of association with them and expelled from the congregation? My own observations tell me that the "survival rate" among ex-Witnesses (both those who are disfellowshipped and those who leave of their own accord) is relatively low. (And the turnover rate, according to one ex-Witness who had access to headquarters records, is extraordinarily high.)

The Witnesses' explanation for deviant behavior after leaving the community is that "the demons have taken over the minds" of the defectors. It might be closer to the mark to say that the need for certainty and community that led certain people to become Witnesses in the first place drives them to find community and certainty and surcease from pain elsewhere. Ex-Witnesses who are functioning in the world still express anxiety, distress, and at best a lingering sadness:

I am a former Witness. Both parents baptized in 1951, when I was 7. 1 was 11 when I was baptized. Pioneered throughout my teens. Honor student. Married an unbaptized Witness at 21. (Didn't feel worthy enough to marry a full-fledged Brother!) Four children by caesarian and three miscarriages. Alcoholism and sleeping pills. Knew one more Seconal or pregnancy would probably end my life.

Because of my "evil" thoughts which I used alcohol to drown, and because of that alcoholism, I was certain I was to be destroyed. When I got to that point, I felt I had nothing to lose anyway, so I left. Everything! House, car, air conditioning, husband, natural family (all Witnesses), job, religion, and children.

It's been four years now. I have never been happier or healthier in my entire life. I am in charge of an outdoor labor crew. Taking a college course. Have a male partner of two years who loves me. No more asthma, no more inability to get to sleep. No more feeling of hopeless inadequacy, no fear of the future. Have worked in community projects.

I still feel sad. -Sundiana G., New Orleans, Louisiana

I find myself often muddled and confused, and always struggling. I am almost 27 and stopped going to "the meetings" when I was 17. My main reason (I guess) for leaving then was the opposition I got for wanting to go to college-that and the lack of intelligent persons to converse with left me feeling very uncomfortable. I finally moved to my own apartment at 22 when I couldn't stand it anymore. I will never be able to rid myself of all of the gut fears and confusion that I now feel whenever I think about religion. I try to ignore the entire issue. I was never allowed to mingle socially or to date. I am now unable to function socially in groups of more than four people.--D.A.R., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

I have been unable to tell psychiatrists what my life was as a Jehovah's Witness. No friend or lover has ever shared these experiences. My life was oppressed from two forces which combined to narrow my options to just about nothing. The religion forbade all but necessary contact with the outside world. My family still maintained the old Sicilian isolationism, sexual Puritanism, and sheltering of girls, primacy of the family, mistrust of strangers....

I wrote in a journal throughout high school. Pages and pages of torment. All my friends were Witnesses. The world was in turmoil, frightening, inaccessible. I had never experienced it. All I wanted was one taste-a chance to make my own decision. Else what good was my faith, untested? Around and around. As I grew older my friendships dwindled. I was too aloof and intellectual for the Witnesses.

During all these years I changed from a person who could not fall asleep unless I prayed to one who could not remember the words. As I stood up to sing at meetings I felt a great weariness. I was practicing the worst deception. I was deceiving myself. At last, one day out in service with a friend, I simply could not open my mouth to speak. After ringing the doorbell, I knew I would be unable to say a word, and I called to her for help. We looked at each other and all the doubt and fear and humiliation underlying our activity was in our eyes. She took me home. Later she married a Catholic and was disfellowshipped.

After this I hung onto my double life for a few more years, vacillating. I finally knew that I had to choose a life in one camp or the other, and I chose the world.

Now I suffer from freedom like everyone else who turns her back on authority.—E.Z., Moorestown, New Jersey.

There is no voluntary resignation in our organization, Covington told a jury in the Moyle case.

For years after I left Bethel, I dreamed that I was back in the antiseptic halls of the Watchtower residence, fighting to find a way out. At each NO EXIT sign a Witness stood, smiling, barring my way: -“There is no way out." The dream was trite; my fear was fresh and vivid and palpable.

Since my departure, I have had a series of strange encounters with Watchtower elders, each one puzzling, each one a walking version of the stale nightmare.

On Christmas Day, 1968, a member of the Watchtower headquarters staff rang my doorbell and asked, "Are you Connie Grizzuti's daughter who used to be associated with the Lord's sheep?" I leaped at once to the conclusion that something had happened to my mother. I had thought that I was "killing" my mother by leaving her religion; the appearance of that man on Christmas-the holiday we had regarded as devilish and abominable, the holiday that had drawn my mother and me together in sisterly mutual defiance of the world-triggered the guilt I had never been able to expiate. My mother is dead, I thought; I really have killed her.

The reality, less awful, was quite odd enough: "It has come to our attention," the man said, "that in 1963, you were observed making obeisance in the Shiva temple in Warangal, India. You are also known to have made the sign of the cross while passing a Roman Catholic Church in Guatemala City. These are grounds for disfellowshipping. If you can prove, before a group of elders, that you are innocent of the charges, disfellowshipping charges will be halted. If we remain convinced of your guilt, you may be reinstated in the Lord's organization if you beg forgiveness. If we judge you guilty and you do not confess, you will be disfellowshipped. If you refuse to appear before the elders, you will be automatically disfellowshipped."

Odd indeed. There was this silly, but somehow sinister, man underneath my Christmas tree (in itself proof of perfidy), and there were my children, looking no less startled than if Santa Claus himself had popped out of the chimney. And there was I, feeling menaced, understanding the absurdity of such feelings, but nonetheless frightened.

I said, “Wouldn't it be redundant to disfellowship me? After all, I left ten years ago of my own accord." He said, "But you can't leave. You can never leave us. We can expel you. But you, having been baptized into The Truth, are one of us until we say you're not."

I declined-I did not have the reporter's avarice for collecting facts or experience then-to appear before the elders. And I was frightened. (I did rather mischieviously offer him some Christmas punch, which he waved away with a shudder of distaste.)

They did not disfellowship me; I don't know why. A friend who once worked in the "Service Department" of Bethel, which handles disfellowshipping procedures, suggests that some technicality may have gotten in the way. Perhaps somewhere along the line, a technical procedure had been violated. In any case, I was left to wonder if they had spies who followed former Witnesses around the world to collect evidence.

It was not until 1974 that I was paid another official visit.

Years before, I had converted a young Brooklyn girl who had later married a Bethelite. They had been assigned to circuit-overseer work in Alabama. Lee and Donald, having returned from their assignment, came to pay me a "friendly visit." I had fond memories of them both. I remembered Lee as a spunky, sweet, feisty kid, not overly serious, given to easy laughter. Donald, twenty years her senior, had had impressive reserve and movie-star-perfect good looks. He was serious about everything. We'd had, before he met Lee, a couple of dates. He was courteous, contained, formal. We went roller-skating; he was austere even in a roller-skating rink. (I liked him.) He did nothing casually; I should not have been surprised when he said, in firm, measured tones-spacing each word to give it weight-"I'd like this relationship to deepen beyond friendship." But I was taken aback by what seemed, even for a repressed Bethelite, to be an overly calculated approach to romance. I made one of those hopelessly inadequate, awkward speeches that begins, “I like you too much to encourage you….” Still, I had been flattered, and I could not but regard him with affection.

I had not seen either of them for close to twenty years. The years had added dignity to Donald's almost-too-regular features; he was, if anything, more handsome than ever. Tomboy Lee had taken on some of her husband's coloration; she too now spoke in firm, measured tones, and I missed her careless spontaneity. She was dressed in what is called a matron's "ensemble," everything matching. She took in my cluttered living room with a swift, practiced glance and said, "it looks like a writer's house." (I took that as a reproach.) There was prefunctory conversation.

The first thing Donald said was that he hadn't come to "blackmail" or to spank" me. He spoke of the "rife immorality" in the world today and requested my 11-year-old daughter, who was finding all of this fascinating, to leave the room so that he could discuss rife immorality. I replied that there was not much that could surprise my daughter (who had meanwhile kicked me in the shins to signal her unwillingness to depart) and that I felt perfectly free to speak in front of her.

Donald: "Do you consider yourself one of Jehovah's Witnesses?”-

B.H. "Of course not."

Donald: "What would you like the congregations to think of you?"

B.H.: "What they think of me is up to them, surely."

Donald: "When you were baptized into the New World Society you took out citizenship in a new order. Are you renouncing your citizenship?"

To that question I had no ready answer; it seemed preposterous that anyone should ask it.

Donald: "There are several reasons for leaving The Truth. One, you reject doctrine. Two, you have had personal conflicts with individual Witnesses or with the organization. Three, you have committed immoral acts, and your shame keeps you away. Which of these reasons applies to you?"

I shrank from the inquisition. I had looked forward to seeing Lee and Donald-partly out of curiosity; partly out of a notion that, once friends, we could find common ground; and partly, I guess, out of arrogance: Perhaps if I explained myself, I might be able to dent their certainty. I

did want to explain myself. My tentative efforts were impatiently received by Donald. He parried everything I said with Scripture. Donald seemed genuinely to believe that people's motives were always clear to them.

"Did you know what you were doing when you were baptized"'

"But I was nine years old!"

"But did you know what you were doing?"

(My daughter, Anna, said later that it was like a TV game show: Donald was the moderator-with all the answers and all the questions-and I was the contestant.)

Donald grew clearly weary (my answers tended to be long). "Let's concentrate on immorality," he said.

My daughter settled herself in with a pleased anticipatory sigh. She had spent much of the previous week airing her opinions on abortion (pro) and open marriage (con), and she was eager, I could see, to engage herself in what she assumed would be a freewheeling discussion of morality and mores.

Donald said to his wife, the tone of his voice straightening Anna's spine, "Lee, I'd like you and Anna to leave the room. I'm sure Anna would like to show you her bedroom."

Anna, a dutiful hostess, departed as gracefully as thwarted curiosity would allow.

“I have asked the girls to leave so that if you wish to confide your immorality to me, you can do so privately. I will pray over you, if you like, so that the Lord's spirit may return to you.”

When Anna returned, having stayed away for what she judged a decent interval, Donald was still discussing "rife immorality." Anna, grabbing her chance, offered, "Well, I kind of agree with you about immorality. I don't think anybody should fuck unless they really love each other."

Donald and Lee stood up to leave. Donald advised me that if I persisted in my course of action, I stood the risk of being disfellowshipped-like my friend Walter--"And then none of the Lord's people will ever be able to speak to you again."

Anna demanded, "You don't talk to Walter? But he's a good person. He's nice. That's not religion!"

Later she said, "They act pleasant. But they're not nice."

"Well, they're nice if you're one of them," I said.

"That's not nice," Anna said.

As Donald and Lee marched down the stairs, Donald called back over his shoulder, "Remember, we came here because we love you. We didn't come to spank you. We won't put in an official report on this. This was a friendship visit."

Three days later, Donald phoned. He proposed to visit with a committee of elders from the congregation to administer "spiritual discipline." I acquiesced almost hungrily. I had found my anger. And I wanted to know, What next?

I was convinced that this time they would inaugurate disfellowshipping procedures against me. I also felt that I needed protection, though I didn't know quite from what. I asked my brother if he would be with me when they came. My brother, though he wishes that I didn't feel compelled to write about the Witnesses, for our mother's sake, is absolutely decent and could not, furthermore, resist this "call upon the blood." He came and sat waiting, stern-faced, for whoever was to dare insult his sister. Donald came not with a committee of three, but with a single member of the headquarters staff. The agenda had been changed: no spiritual discipline, he said, just a talk. (Their motives and their actions were, and are, entirely obscure to me.) Donald asked my brother to leave the room. "Why do you need protection?" he asked. "What are you afraid of?"

My brother prevented me from having to answer. "I'm my sister's brother," he said, "and I'm not going anywhere. Anything my sister says, she says it to me too. Nothing she says could make me love her less. She's honest, she won't lie whether I'm here or not, and the two of you came together like two nuns, so I'm staying. Now what's your story?"

Donald offered a repeat of his previous performance. There were veiled hints of dire consequences if I did not "turn around and confess"; there was explicit spiritual blackmail: I would die at Armageddon. But Donald and his friend seemed to run out of energy; they began to talk about me in the third person, as if I weren't there. They started to preach to my brother. He said, "Hey. You can't get my sister. So now you're hitting on me? Have some respect. You're in my sister's house."

They left. My brother and I looked at each other. "What was that all about?” he said. I said I had no idea.

The rules-games-are often obscure. A young friend of mine left the Witnesses and made absolutely clear to them her determination not to return. She sent a letter announcing her determination to the Watchtower Society-which didn't deign to reply-and another to her local congregation. She did receive a certified letter from the local congregation, regretting that she no longer wished to join with them in Christian worship and indicating that they would respect her decision. The letter went on, however, to state that the congregation had been informed that she had indulged in certain indiscreet actions of an unchristian nature (and that they had witnesses), and wished to meet with her to discuss the matter, giving a date and place for the meeting and urging her to reply.

J. F. Rutherford, according to the records of the testimony in the Moyle case, thundered. Nathan H. Knorr's voice was rather thin, but pleasantly modulated, with an affecting timbre. He spoke with the practiced and prim voice of the headmaster who metes out reward and punishment dispassionately. It was a voice I learned, at Bethel, to dread, full of warm if fuzzy paternal concern one day, cold and razor-sharp the next, always rectitudinous. His rebukes were scathing. They came, as had Rutherford's, at mealtimes.

The morning bells woke us at 6:30. At 6:55, showered and dressed, we ran down the stairs to the basement dining hall. We sat at tables of ten. Our day began with tension and bustle. Breakfast, served briskly and efficiently by white-coated waiters, lasted ten minutes and was preceded by a discussion of the Bible text for the day. Knorr or, in his absence, a director of the Society called upon members of the “family” for comments on the text. Being late was a Bad Thing: four hundred sets of eyes turned upon you if you attempted to slide invisibly into your place. Absenting oneself from breakfast altogether was a Very Bad Thing. If you were not there when Knorr called upon you, it was a Terrible Thing. (I can remember "sleeping over”- a rare self-indulgence-no more than five times in three and a half years. On those occasions, I had breakfast at a cheap drugstore counter in the Heights; no other meals ever tasted as good. I drank coffee and ate sugary, doughy apple turnovers and looked around and thought wonderingly that this was the way other people lived all the time. I savored those few moments of anonymity.)

Sometimes, in addition to the discussion of the text, there was a harangue. (I remember the aroma of coffee brewing in the kitchen, the effort to look alert and intelligent when one was dopey with sleep and to arrange one's face muscles into an unrevealing mask.) We never, afterward, discussed among ourselves the justice of Knorr's attack; we avoided each other's eyes; there was no redress for the victim, no acquittal in a court of popular opinion.

The attack that stands out most vividly in my mind was one that was wrapped in an anti-Semitism that has infected the Watchtower Society since its beginning. In the Watchtower printery, and at the Bethel residence, we worked eight hours and forty minutes a day, five and a half days a week. We filled out time sheets daily at the factory, and there was no time allotted for coffee or rest breaks. An elderly Bethelite on my floor of the factory kept a small supply of chocolates and candies, which he sold to hungry workers at candy-store cost on an honor system; we dropped our nickels and dimes into a box while he was busy at his menial work. I suppose he made a few pennies' profit each day; and I suppose also that he was one of those who received no financial help from the outside, so that those pennies were important. I can't remember ever having heard him speak.

Knorr heard about the little enterprise and read the old man out, at great length, in public. He tied his attack to the fact that the man was a Jew. The Jews, Knorr asserted, had always been willful, penny-grubbing ingrates. Jehovah had chosen them precisely to show that such unappetizing raw material could be redeemed if they adhered to His laws. The candy seller was, Knorr said, demonstrating all the abysmal qualities that had led the Jews to kill Christ. And so on, for an hour, while I cringed. Part of the horror was in knowing that there was no one I could share it with, no one to whom I would or could protest; part of the horror was my guilt. My silence was complitious.

We see the beginnings of the return of divine favor to fleshly Israel already manifested in the beginning of a turning away of their blindness and their prejudice against Christ Jesus, in the opening up of the land of promise and their expulsion from other lands, and also in the returning fruitfulness of Palestine itself. . . . Fleshly Israel, recovered from blindness, shall be used as a medium through whom the streams of salvation, issuing from the glorified, spiritual Israel, shall flow to all the families of the earth.-SS, Vol. III (1891), pp. 293, 307

Nothing in the return of the Jews to Palestine and the setting up of the Israeli republic corresponds with Bible prophecies concerning the restoration of Jehovah's name-people to his favor and organization. -LGBT, rev. ed., 1952, pp. 213-18

In 1911, Charles Taze Russell returned from a trip around the world to a great ovation in the New York Hippodrome, where he was acclaimed by thousands of New York Jews. Russell supported the Jews' return to Palestine. He saw the Jews as God's instruments. But even as he proclaimed that Israel would be the medium of salvation, he commented on the "unchanged physiognomy of Jews," their hooked noses, and talked with scarcely concealed contempt of their supposed predilections: "Among the relics of antiquity that have come down to our day, there is no other object of so great interest as the Jewish people. . . . The national characteristics of many centuries ago are still prominent, even to their fondness for the leeks and onions and garlic of Egypt, and their stiff-necked obstinacy." [SS III, pp. 243-44)

Russell believed that the pogroms and the persecution of the Jews were inspired by God (for their own good and for the ultimate glory of mankind); and he believed also that a disproportionate number of Jews are blessed with the ability to score worldly and financial success. [Ibid., pp. 270-71]

Russell had proclaimed that "the deliverance of fleshly Israel" was due to take place before 1914: "The re-establishment of Israel in the land of Palestine is one of the events to be expected in this day of the Lord." [Ibid., P.244] The year 1881, he believed, marked the time for "the turning back of special light upon the long-blinded Jews." [p. 278) "Restitution," he wrote, would begin in Palestine: "Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, with Daniel and all the holy prophets, will be made perfect-awakened from death to perfect manhood, after the Gospel Church has been glorified; and they will constitute the 'princes in all the earth,' the earthly and visible representatives of the Christ." [p. 265] He claimed to have it on the authority of missionaries , that since 1878, unprecedented "showers and dews in summer" had blessed the Holy Land, preparing it for the influx of Jews, who were "buying land, planting and building, and getting possession of the trade of the city ... many of them . . . rising to distinction far beyond their Gentile neighbors," [pp. 265-66) Jews had been propelled to Palestine by persecution in Russia and Germany, which had been "permitted" by

God: "God has permitted . . .afflictions and persecutions to come as a penalty for their national crime of rejection of the gospel and crucifixion of the Redeemer. He will . . .in due time reward the constancy of their faith in his promises. God foreknew their pride and hardness of heart. . . . Within the present century a sifting and separating process is manifest among them, dividing them into two classes, the Orthodox and the Non-orthodox Jews." The Non-orthodox Jews, Russell declaimed, were "losing faith in a personal God . . . drifting toward liberalism, rationalism, infidelity. The Orthodox include most of the poor, oppressed Jews, as well as some of the wealthy and learned, and are vastly more numerous than the Non-orthodox; though the latter are by far the more influential and respected, often bankers, merchants, editors, etc." [p. 248]

Horrified equally by rich Jews and the specters of socialism and anarchism, that triple threat, as he saw it, could be eradicated by a simple expedient: "Not until further persecutions shall have driven more of the poorer Jews to Palestine, and modern civilization shall be still further advanced there, will the wealthier classes of Jews be attracted thither; and then it will be in great measure from selfish motives-when the general and great time of trouble shall render property less secure in other lands than it is now. Then Palestine, far away from socialism and anarchism, will appear to be a haven of safety to the wealthy Jews. " A singularly nasty vision, nor did it come to pass quite as Russell foretold. The Jews did not accept Christ as their Savior; and so, once again, the Watchtower Society had to modify its theology to accommodate external realities: By 1952, the Witnesses had changed their opinions, and Russell's fantasies had been put to rest: "Many Jewish leaders believe the Bible supports their being regathered a second time to their 'Holy Land of Palestine,' " the Witnesses were told (they were not told that Russell had shared and promulgated that belief). "Failing to see that spiritual Israel has become the heir to God's promises, they do not appreciate that the . . . fulfillment [of prophecy] applies to the 'Israel of God,' made up of those Jews, inwardly spiritual Israelites, who came out from captivity to this Babylonish world. . . . Israel's applying for admission into the United Nations and her accepting membership in that worldly body which assumes to take the place of Messiah's rule is a flat rejection of God's kingdom of the heavens."

(LGBT, pp. 213-18)

It's an old and wicked story. The oppressed are blamed for their oppression: "To this day the natural circumcised Jews are suffering the sad consequences from the works of darkness that were done within their nation nineteen hundred years ago. This illustrates what can happen to a whole nation that comes under the influence of that unseen superhuman intelligence, Satan the Devil." [TW, Nov. 1, 1975, p. 654]

I had grown up in the gross and painful experience of casual anti-Semitism. By the time I was 15, I could no longer countenance it. I fell in love with a Jew. Arnold was my teacher-English 31J, New Utrecht High School. I occasionally visit that place just to look at it-a prisonlike building so bleak and unlikely that miraculously provided me with the essential person, the person who taught me how to love, and how to doubt.

If, before I met and loved Arnold, I felt that life was a tightrope, I felt afterward that my life was lived perpetually on a high wire with no safety net. I was obliged, by every tenet, to despise him. To be "yoked with an unbeliever," an atheist, and an intellectual ... the pain was exquisite.

Arnold became interested in me because I was smart; he loved me because he thought I was good. He nourished and nurtured me. He paid me the irresistible compliment of totally comprehending me. He hated my religion, but he loved me. I had never before been loved unconditionally. He came, unbidden, to sit with me at every school assembly and hold my hand while everyone else stood to salute the flag. We were highly visible, and I was very much comforted. And this was during the McCarthy era. Arnold had a great deal to lose, and he risked it for me. Nobody had ever risked anything for me before. How could I believe he was wicked?

We drank malteds on his porch and read T. S. Eliot and listened to Mozart. We walked for hours, talking of God and goodness and happiness and death. We met surreptitiously. (My mother so feared and hated the man who was leading me into apostasy that she once threw a loaf of Arnold's bread out the window; his very name was loathsome to her.) Arnold treated me with infinite tenderness; he was the least alarming man I had ever known. His fierce concentration on me, his solicitous care uncoupled with sexual aggression, was the gentlest and most thrilling love I had ever known. He made me feel what I had never felt before-valuable and good.

It was very hard. All my dreams centered around Arnold, who was becoming more important, certainly more real, to me than God. All my dreams were blood-colored. I fantasized that Arnold was converted and survived Armageddon to live forever with me in the New World, or that I would die with Arnold, in fire and flames, at Armageddon. I would try to make bargains with God-my life for his. When I entered Bethel, I confessed my terrors to Nathan H. Knorr. I said that I knew I could not rejoice in the destruction of "the wicked" at Armageddon (Arnold would be among them). I was told that being a woman, and therefore weak and sentimental, I would have to go against my sinful nature and obey God's superior wisdom-which meant never seeing Arnold again.

I did see him again. I had no choice. We never exchanged more than a chaste and solemn kiss; but he claimed me. (I never told him I loved him-I thought the words would set the world off its axis-but of course he knew. He said to me once, "You are so terribly unpossessive." I never knew what he meant.) When I was with him, I felt as if I were in a state of grace.

To say that our relationship was ambiguous is to belittle it; I know now that he loved many men and women, and all of them thought of Arnold as singularly their own. (It has not happened, as it often does, that his death clarified his life. For all of us who loved him, he moves still, mysteriously, enigmatically, through our imaginations, never defined, grieved for still, always loved.) I tell myself that he loved no one more than he loved me.

When I left religion, Arnold alone wept. When I walked out the door of Bethel for the last time, one of my fellow workers said, "But why?"

“Because God can't kill Arnold," I said.

Contents

I Personal Beginnings: 1944

11 Organizational Beginnings: (1873-1912) Charles Taze Russell

III Waiting for the World to Die

IV Accumulating Wealth While the World Refuses to Die

V God Can't Kill Arnold

VI In Transition

VII Catholics, Mob Violence, Civil Liberties, and the Draft

VIII The Lure of Certainty

IX The Heroic Opportunity and Adventure: Jehovah's Witnesses Overseas

X Leaving: 1955

Abbreviated Codes for Sources Frequently Cited and Additional Sources

Index

from: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/26/obituaries/26HARR.html