GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast
GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast
259. Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue- Pilgrimage, Prophecy, and the Call of a Woman’s Life
In this week’s episode of Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue, Jerry L. Martin and Abigail L. Rosenthal explore how God communicates through intuition, dreams, insights, and the quiet promptings that redirect a life.
Their conversation speaks directly to listeners who wonder why God can feel hidden and how to recognize a true divine nudge.
Jerry reflects on the moment he heard the message “Your work here is over,” a turning point that led him away from a successful Washington career and toward writing God: An Autobiography. He describes how inner guidance can be unmistakable even when it arrives without logic or explanation.
Abigail offers her own powerful experiences, including years of divine absence in her twenties, a visionary encounter with angelic presence and prophecy, and the moral resolve that shaped her effort to remove a predatory figure from her temple. She shows how spiritual experience intersects with honor, justice, and courage in real life.
Together, Jerry and Abigail consider why divine guidance is unpredictable, how intuition challenges rational analysis, and how spiritual communication reshapes our understanding of calling and purpose. They reflect on timing, prophecy, and the ways God works through both silence and intervention.
The episode also turns toward women’s lives, agency, vulnerability, and the limits of second-wave feminism.
Abigail reflects on what she feels called to now, and Jerry considers how her insights continue the larger spiritual and philosophical journey they share. This intimate dialogue weaves together spiritual autobiography, lived philosophy, and honest testimony.
Other Series:
The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:
The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.
From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.
Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.
Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.
What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.
What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.
What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue.
Stay Connected
- Read the book: God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher at godanautobiography.com or Amazon
- Share your questions and reflections: questions@godanautobiography.com
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Scott Langdon [ 00:00:17,220 ]This is God: An Autobiography, The Podcast, a dramatic adaptation and continuing discussion of the book God: An Autobiography as Told to a Philosopher by Jerry L Martin. He was a lifelong agnostic, but one day he had an occasion to pray. To his vast surprise, God answered in words. Being a philosopher, he had a lot of questions and God had a lot to tell him.
Scott Langdon [ 00:00:58,840 ] Episode 259. Welcome to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. I'm your host, Scott Langdon. Jerry and Abigail return to the program this week with their very latest discussion in our ongoing series, Jerry and Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue.
Scott Langdon [ 00:01:27,950 ] In this week's conversation, the two talk about God's ability to communicate with each one of us through so many different means and what we must be open to and pay attention to in order to understand God's will for our particular lives. What roles are we being called to play in the different scenes of our lives? What experiences are we being nudged to pay attention to? Here's Jerry. I hope you enjoy the episode.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:02:02,610 ] Well, thank you for joining me again, sweetheart, for an intimate dialogue. Because there's always something on our minds and something I've been sharing, I think, on the podcast and elsewhere recently, because we're always talking about, how do you... I guess we were talking a lot about finding one's path and maybe having a calling and how do you know what your calling is?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:02:28,480 ] There's always this question, well, how do you get in touch with the divine? And early in God: An Autobiography, as I've told people, I was kind of irritated because God seemed to want us to relate, to God, to the divine reality, and yet seems so horribly hidden, just hidden. So that it's easier to be an atheist than a believer. With this hidden God.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:02:54,140 ] And I said, why are You in hiding? God said, I'm not in hiding. And then He gives this line I've been quoting. It's the very first time I was told, there are other places I'm given other lists, some of which are even longer than this one, but God says, 'No, I'm not in hiding.'
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:03:10,630 ] I communicate, this is God to Jerry, I communicate through prayer. Through dreams? Through insights that seem like one's own thoughts. Through hunches and intimations and intuitions. So any kind of nudge, you might say, any stray thought, could have an element of the divine in. And one thing that's important for everyone to understand… don't say, 'Oh, I wish God would speak to me.' Because God's speaking to you. I, in fact, tell people, just let God come to you however God comes to you. You know, you don't get to set the rules for this bit of communication. Just open yourself, but pay attention. Otherwise, you'll just miss it and not realize this is for me. This is a message for me.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:04:03,640 ] But what was on my mind as I was thinking further about this in terms of my life, your life, sweetheart, as we're both philosophers, and living by divine hunches and nudges is a very different way to live. We kind of live by some conception of rationality. We both read Plato's Dialogues, a model of rational exploration. I like Aristotle, who's another model, he virtually invented logic.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:04:40,580 ] And all the theory of the syllogism and all we got straight from, from Aristotle. You like Spinoza, the great rationalist, the greatest rationalist of all, because he started with the definition of substance. Substance is essentially infinite, because otherwise to be bounded wouldn't really be substance, and deduces everything from that by geometrical steps that ends up surprisingly rich. So we were just talking the other day. The last two sections of Human Bondage, which has been taken as the name of a novel and of human freedom. Have I got it right? Or it might be a blessedness. It probably is blessedness.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:05:27,710 ] A bit of both, anyway.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:05:29,370 ] Because blessedness is the key. If you succeed, you're blessed. Yeah, if you... do everything right. You achieve blessedness.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:05:42,110 ] But it's kind of funny to switch from that where you can kind of explain and lay out to yourself or to another person if they ask why you're doing what you're doing. And you can say, 'Oh, I have this goal or this principle or this important feature of my life I'm cherishing, protecting, putting on.’ And then, at a certain point, you can't quite do that so well. And how has that unfolded for you, sweetheart? Do you recognize what I'm saying as a phenomenon in you're a life you go from. Following the great rationalist or the great dialectician, a great logician and all of a sudden you're trying to live by divine prompts or nudges, how do you experience that?
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:06:40,290 ] It would be hard for me to call up a road map. The whole thing is, this God relationship is kind of banked about in a certain fog of non-recollection, although prior to that connection, I made it a point of honor to recollect everything in sequence and in high resolution detail.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:07:18,270 ] My memory has gotten foggier, and agnostics and atheists could point to that as a sign that my mind has been ruined by the admission of God into my relationship with reality.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:07:38,540 ] What I can testify to, as they say when they get up in Pentecostal church and testify. Jews don't do that much, but they don't do that at all, actually. But anyway, I've seen it done. What I can testify... too, is that God has on occasion manifested God's presence to me, but unpredictably, And there's no logos, no coherent and complete account of God appearances as Spinoza purports to have given one of how you get from human bondage to human self-liberation— I don't have a story of that kind to tell. One of the more dramatic moments in my life story had to do with walking down a grate on 80th Street toward the East River in Manhattan to the Board of Higher Education.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:09:09,650 ] In what was, I would call it despair, except despair has a drama to it. You know, if you have a muffled, inarticulate, disconsolate sense of hopelessness, that would be closer than the drama, the sort of Sturm und Drang drama of despair. So in a state of muffled hopelessness, I'm walking toward the Board of Higher Education at the end of this block. To have my umpty-umpth hearing.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:09:48,780 ] On the question of whether, after seven years of punitive successive firings for having voted for the loser in a department election for chairman, I should be reinstated. And everybody I know has said, drop it, Abigail. You're making yourself crazy. Don't do it anymore. You're getting in a very negative way, one pointed, you have only one thing on your mind. This is distorting your personality. This is not healthy. And I have this personal motif or guideline having to do with making my life and its story intelligible. If I run into a roadblock blocking my purposes, I want to try every expedient I can discover to get over the roadblock or get it to one side before I give up. Because the story won't work. The story won't be true.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:11:14,860 ] If I claim that I tried everything, but I tried everything minus one thing— one last thing that I failed to try. So the reason I'm still trying to get reinstated after getting fired for this vote that’s supposedly in honor, I'm permitted to take, but in reality, not so much is because I don't yet know that it's a loser that I've embarked on a game, who's denouement is radical and total frustration. So I'm walking downhill on 80th Street. And...
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:12:01,900 ] For the last of the hearings, for a hearing beyond toleration. I don't know what gargoyle faces will show up at the hearing, but if you've seen a cartoon by Daumier and you know what bureaucrats look like, you know, it's sort of like a season in hell. I don't know where they get those faces, but... You think of cynicism, then you redouble that, then you square it, and you've got the bureaucrats of the Board of Higher Education in New York. So I'm going to see the Bureaucrats, which is a trip to hell. And I'm going down grade and nobody's with me because everybody's got too much sense to accompany this harebrained, quixotic fool. You know, I'm supposed to be a philosopher and I'm widely pegged as a fool. All right. And then suddenly... I feel something besides me in the same space.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:13:17,650 ] And it's tied umbilically to the center of me. And it's an umbilical cord- is as close as I can describe it- but it's not made of matter. It's not made of protoplasm. It's made of some ethereal material, and connected in a straight line to this umbilical cord, is a line of figures behind me.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:13:50,140 ] Black bearded, silvery robes, no discernible feet beneath the robes and there is a point of historical origin which is Ur of the Chaldees.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:14:12,420 ] You know, in inter-religious discussion, there's a kind of polite omission of the Jewish factor, which extends at the head of all of Western religion. So, you know, let's decapitate that and go on from there. Well, I don't think that's a very sensible move, but everybody seems to endorse it, so who am I to say? Anyway... For me, for Abigail's imagination, for Abigail's secret never expressed understanding of the supports of a human life. It happens in temporal and chronological history, and it begins the God-man relationship.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:15:03,330 ] If you can still say 'God,' 'man,' 'God,' 'man,' 'a woman,' 'relationship,' 'man,' 'generic man,' begins when Abraham hears in Hebrew, God saying, 'Lech Lecha,’ get the up and get thee out to a place that I will show thee. And so that's oral vitality is where it began and it's continued to Abigail walking down 80th Street. And it's connected.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:15:36,140 ] And I have a sense that these bearded figures have been watching all along. I have not been obscure. I have not been known as a Meshuggah. I am not eccentric. I am exactly in the middle of the, you know, an Aristotelian-like mean.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:16:02,070 ] In the middle of my life, and it's all been watched. And it's got a name. And it's not a Greek name. The name is pilgrimage.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:16:15,270 ] I think that's more Christian, actually, than Jewish. But anyway, pilgrimage. I've been on a long pilgrimage, which means to me, that every meaningless step of this futile battle, with a big bureaucracy that cares nothing about people. They're not built to care about individuals and their stories. Every step has been cared about and is visible and is recollected chronologically, step by step, step by step. By these angelic beings, as I later learned from a friend, that's what... to call them.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:17:01,620 ] And... It's over. I'm told it's over. And I see they've been on an etheric path. It's kind of a little bit shaded in gold? And it's above the concrete pavement. And it ends right under the overhang. Oh, the Board of Higher Education, it's all over. It's over.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:17:31,540 ] I don't, you know, it's not about belief. I could be asked by philosopher friends, did you believe them? How did you know this wasn't a hallucination? When you're riding a horse, you don't ask, do I believe that it's switched from a trot to a canter?
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:17:56,110 ] You just get in position to ride the canter. And if you don't, you'll fall off the horse. So for me, it was more like that. I have to get positioned. I don't know what I believe. I know what I've just experienced, which didn't ask me to believe anything.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:18:13,820 ] At the hearing, which is like every other horrible hearing, the Daumier faces. The on immeasurable cynicism. You know, it's cynicism that you can't cut with scissors, it's so thick and many-layered. And I'm not reinstated with tenure. I'm sent back for another year of evaluation by my enemies. To thicken out and make unsaleable the record of me at Brooklyn College, which is now disfigured by one evaluation of my teaching after another by these dedicated enemies who are my colleagues, who are the majority the senior people in the Department of Philosophy. At the end of this, one more horrible year I'm in Maine with my mother.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:19:19,070 ] And I've said to her that... They lied to me, these figures. They lied to me. You know, I'm not respectful. I'm Jewish. I have a real relation. Somebody lies to you, you think it and you say it to someone you trust, as I trusted my mother. I get a phone call from the Professional Staff Congress in Maine.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:19:50,970 ] With the latest word on Abigail's case. The head of the union has said to me at one point, Abigail Rosenthal, 'You're all I do.' You know, and it wasn't a compliment.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:20:06,200 ] Their number one client, their only client.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:20:08,570 ] Nobody fights like I fought, but I'm not fighting for my job. I want to understand. I'm a philosoph. What happened when I voted? For the loser in a department election. What does happen? You know, it doesn't happen to everybody, but I'm the only survivor. All the other junior faculty have gone on to, one hopes, greener or anyway other pastures. I'm there. The union says I've been reinstated. With tenure, that's job security.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:20:44,750 ] Retroactive. To the previous June. Which was when the angels told me it was over. So they just confirmed they understand. I don't know how to characterize this relation to time. They've understood the future as if it had already happened in what became the past.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:21:22,480 ] I'm not an ontologist, a cosmologist. Theories of time are not my thing. So I've never meditated or tried to reconstruct, philosophically, what this says about time. For me what it says about my story is occasionally... there's a more than natural element that enters one's story. Unpredictably. And, but, actually.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:21:58,710 ] You can say I was overstressed and hallucinating, but you can't say that the prediction I got or the pronouncement I got, which was ratified a year later retroactively, was not an illusion. That was fulfilled. The way the Delphic Oracle used to be. That was an oracular prophecy which came true.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:22:36,810 ] I don't know if that's the only… that's probably not the only case of how one interacts with the divine in an intimate way.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:22:51,570 ] You do it almost on a daily basis. One thing that might be useful for people to hear this because it's something we could all do, you might say. You sometimes write in your journal, personal journal, late in the day. And as I understand it, you clarify, but as I understand it, at some point in the journal, you often write as if you're addressing God.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:23:21,140 ] And then you write whatever comes to you. At that point. As if it's God responding. That seems to be a very good thing to do. We don't know from our side. We don't have a little, I remember in chemistry class, there were these little litmus strips you could test if something was acidic or not, but we don't have any little litmus tests for the divine voice. But there's a good chance, if you sincerely, not just asking God help me win the Preakness race and make a bunch of money on my bet, but if you're asking with sincerity and wholesomeness of heart, and you want to know what you should do, there's a good chance that what comes next does have an element of the divine in it. Anyway, that's my understanding of what you do, does that fit your understanding? Or would you put it?
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:24:33,020 ] Yeah, it fits it to a tee. It fits it like a shoe of the right size for your foot. That's the best I know, you can't compel the divine visitor to visit. But you can put out a sincere invitation and then go with what you got, with what you get.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:25:00,570 ] And that's what I know about these communications. Maybe somebody's more expert, but that more expert person isn't me. I have to go with what I know. And, you know, if I look back over my own life story, some of which I've told in Confessions of a Young Philosopher, which is in part a story of experiencing divine abandonment. And people do experience that. They knock and nobody answers. They ask to be admitted. You can hear the knuckles on the window, but nobody comes to open the door. You get communications like that. You're more in touch with people you don't know than I am. And my experience has been that there were desperate years in my twenties.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:26:17,100 ] When that happened, all too often, what I think now, and it's a very un-sentimental belief I have, is that in my own case, that's all I can speak from at present, in my own case, the divine absence motored certain developments in my life story, which I've written about. And which, tenderer minds than my own would speak of with regret, my goodness, poor girl, what happened to you? Gee, you sound like you went around the bend. That's too bad, but some of the story's nice, and some's not.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:27:23,740 ] My story put me in touch, this non-appearance of God, put me into contact with certain helps or purported helps that were deeply deceiving, deeply shot through with betrayal of those hopes. And to come through it and survive it with the help of some concerned parties who weren't me, to come through it and stand on the other side, gave me equipment with which to wade through what would be happening in American culture and perhaps Western culture in the 1960s.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:28:26,360 ] The counterculture, all that quasi-gnostic, you know, real life on the ground is not good enough for us, so we're going to, as Albert Camus said, when he said, 'I refuse to kill my brother for an unreal city in the future.' Quoted to me by Richard Wright. Everybody's headed for an unreal city in the future. The feminists are headed for the unreal city, the war resistors are headed for the unreal city, the tear down university mobs are headed for an unreal city in the future. I wasn't.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:29:19,250 ] I'd been to the unreal city in the future and was quite satisfied that it didn't have a smidgen of reality in it. It was a projection. It was where you pretend to be living when chronological history on the ground sequences of your life are close to untenable, close to unbearable. Those unreal cities that you catapult yourself into with hope, with projection, with dreams, with fantasies, they don't cure the situation on the ground.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:30:37,260 ] Of course, I have the benefit of God speaking to me usually in a voice. Not always, sometimes I pray. And before any voice comes up, I kind of already know the answer. I don't know if you've had experiences like that, but because God isn't just out there far away going to have to send a carrier pigeon— or something, God is also inside you, and you can just tell by the gravitational feel of your organs, everything is in place for going this way and not going that other way.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:31:16,650 ] I was having a great career in Washington, D. C. when the God voice first came to me. And driving across the bridge into D. C. from Northern Virginia into D. C. one day to work, which as I explained to me was a daily call-to-purpose. I felt what we were all, what I and my colleagues were doing was very valuable work serving something you might say greater than ourselves in terms of the body politic and the culture. Those were my NEH days. Driving over the bridge, comes to me. Your work here is over.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:31:59,880 ] Huh. Your work here is over. Subsequently, I got the call, it was clear I was supposed to write this up in a book. It was clear this kind of God voice role was not going to be compatible with the job I had at the time, I guess by then, I was running my own organization, maybe getting the timeline a little off. But, I phased down my work. I'm not a guy who's going to jump off the bridge because a voice says 'jump off the bridge.' But, phased back my hours at work, turned down jobs. I was being called by White House personnel about top jobs in a new administration coming in, because by that point in my life, I had all these connections and so forth. And no, no, no, I can't consider any of these. They would have enhanced my resume, you might say. But no, can't consider those. And got the income down to the level by just cutting back, cutting back, cutting back.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:33:09,590 ] I've realized I need this amount of income to maintain our lifestyle, because at this point we're married, of course. And I ask my tax guy, who often gives me financial advice. Given here are my retirement things, you know, federal retirement and whatever I had can I draw this level of income.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:33:34,250 ] And this level of income is the minimum you and I would need. If I were single, I could go even more drastic. But, you know, I just married someone. I can't say, 'oh, now we're going to take vows of poverty and go put out tin cups or something. No, it had to be something that would, roughly speaking, maintain our lifestyle. And he said, 'yes, you can.' And I did it. Well, these are rather large life decisions, aren't they? And yet you make them. In this odd way. You know, what's the calculation here? It's against every ordinary calculation. Why would I, having spent years to get a career in Washington, which is kind of a tough town, the way New York is a tough town. When you come as an outsider, and in Washington, everybody's an outsider, all the political class— you might say, and civil servants, and anybody in government or an advisory role to government— is an outsider and it's a tough town full of ambitious people climbing over one another. And I'd gotten, I remember Disraeli said at some point, I finally gotten to the top of the slippery pole.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:34:43,820 ] parliamentary politics. Well, I wasn't at the very top, but I was high up on the slippery pole and could have secured that kind of career, but... No, no, your work here is over. And you're going to do what? Very unclear. What to do. As you know, sweetheart, I still find it basically embarrassing. I don't readily tell strangers, oh, God talks to me. Looney Tunes, Looney Tunes, you know.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:35:18,630 ] A person of the 21st century American, you know? And this all seems very strange to me. So it's hard to even explain to people why I did what I did. And what is this going to be? And when it became clear I was supposed to publish a book, and first I thought God was giving me guidance, and then I would write my own book, you might say, in light of what God was whispering in my ear. But no, then it turned out that I was supposed to just publish the actual back and forth. That's my prayer life, you know, me putting questions usually giving me answers. So the God: An Autobiography is, I don't know, 85, 90% God talking. And I just put enough so people can sort of follow the context of those exchanges.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:36:05,950 ] But I even prayed: Can I publish this anonymously? I wouldn't have to be… And often that works well for sales. By anonymous, it sounds like, ooh, this is really the secret story or something. No, no, you've got to stand behind it. I haven't thought about changing my name. You know, maybe a nifty sort of name, Jerry Prophet or something that would help sell the book and it wouldn't connect to me and my career.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:36:39,200 ] One does these things. I remember in one context, and I don't want to go through the details, sweetheart. About an issue in your Jewish temple locally. Where you get the guidance, I don't know if this was writing in your journal method.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:36:58,330 ] Or how this came to you. Get this scum out of my house. There is a guy making the women in the temple very uncomfortable. And maybe just leave that at that. And you were about the only one, I guess, some had spoken up, but they were ignored. And you're a little more persistent about things and then somehow, you can tell me how, I don't know, but I think the words actually came to you, and it might have been one of these things, God says one of the ways God speaks is thoughts that seem like one's own. So it could be you're just thinking about it. And it comes to you. I've got to get this scum out of God's house. But I think the words actually were, get this scum out of my house.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:37:47,420 ] That's right. I haven't remembered that all these years. You're spot on. That probably undoubtedly nerved me to carry forward one of the most searing and heartbreaking battles of my life. So here we are in deepest Pennsylvania, this New Yorker who...
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:38:17,780 ] In New York, every fourth person is a Jew, roughly speaking. So for a Jew, it's all around you. Everybody knows Hebrew phrases. I didn't know these Hebrew phrases, you know, but everybody in New York knows them. But you come out here and it's like you left and went to a desert island or Tahiti or something.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:38:39,300 ] Yeah, it's not exactly a Jewish place. And everybody, at least in those days, I don't know, now it's perhaps a little different because the cultural surround for Jews in the Western world has become more menacing. But in those days, the operating style of the temple was to keep their heads down and try to blend in and not be noticed, not make a fuss. And I thought to myself, 'Listen, if some father of a teenage girl who's been inappropriately approached by the predator, or some husband of a wife who's been seductively whispered to by the predator, decides to sue, we’ll be very well known. We’ll be a headline.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:39:51,740 ] And that wasn't my motivation, but it was certainly a consideration if I want to protect the temple I now belong to, uncharacteristic in the history of Abigail, I belong to a local temple, and it's careening off a cliff by tolerating and harboring a bad guy. He's got to be gotten out.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:40:20,440 ] Then they decided you were threatening to sue, which is not what you'd said. They were given good legal advice, you might say. And they decided, this often happens to a whistleblower, they decide, 'oh, the whistleblower is the enemy.' The whistleblower is the best friend they've got.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:40:36,980 ] Yeah.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:40:37,200 ] But the whistleblower is the enemy. And they treated you, not the predator, but they treated you as the... 'danger to the temple.'
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:40:48,710 ] Yes, yes. They told a bunch of board members whom I had invited to come to our house so that I could lay out for them the evidence that I had gathered. Because in my seven-year job fight, I learned how to get into a fight with legal implications. So I knew you keep the paper record of every communication. And I had it in chronological sequence. And I wanted to show it to them and share a discussion about what the best thing to do might be and about how quickly the best thing to do might be done.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:41:30,510 ] Instead, all those board members were quietly contacted by other leaders of the temple and told to stay home, to stand us up without making excuses or apology. Some kind of collective rudeness seemed to be in order for them. And instead, two board members who were lawyers visited us to find out whether I had a case and I knew how to lay out the case subsequent to that visit, they did oust the predator subsequent to that visit. I was so deeply wounded and offended by this roughhousing in seven years of job fight against the powers of the City University of New York, I hadn't felt so intimately bruised as I did from the attentions and misguided reactions of my co-religionists. The guidance that I think we both got or perhaps you got. I don't remember. Don't go back there.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:43:11,560 ] Oh, yeah, that came to me in prayer. That you need to somehow regain your honor was the way it was framed by going and giving a talk to the temple, because you're a philosopher, you're... deeply steeped in the Jewish essence, as you put it. And when you hold forth, you do command people's attention. You've been kind of pushed to the side because you're the whistleblower. You're a bit of a pariah. Okay. Well, regain center stage.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:43:53,470 ] Yes.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:43:54,110 ] And that's what you did with the wonderful talk that I think we have. I remember at the last minute that I'm not used to smartphones, normally don't carry it though, but this is a camera, isn't it? And I, at the last minute thought, oh, I should be recording this. So I think we have a recording.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:44:09,590 ] Yes, we did. Yeah. We do. And what's noteworthy… Really, when I think of it, what's noteworthy… Is the concept of honor. That God honors the concept of honor. The lore, which, again, I think comes mostly from Christianity God Encounters that God particularly relishes humility. And you can wear a hair shirt that you can go barefoot or just sandals. It doesn't matter how you look. It doesn't matter what people think of you.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:45:01,080 ] The Jewish relation to God is not like that. God is present to our history in the Jewish relation to God. And our history does involve, as sociobiologists are quick to note, honor, you know, whether we get it from primates, animal ancestry? Whether it's biological or whether it's social. It's thick. It's real. To lose your honor is to lose a lot. And God knows that.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:45:56,610 ] God knows that. And so where one might suppose this is trivial. This is ego. This is superficial. Who cares about honor? You know, I have to do the right thing. To heck with my image, to heck with what people think of me. What's important to survive is the right thing. God doesn't take that view. No playwright doing a drama on stage with protagonists who are contending for support and primacy and whatever people do in social life dramatized for the theater, no playwright would say our main protagonist can go to the final curtain call despised by the other players. Nobody would, people would want their money back at the box office. That's the end of the story? He ends up sitting on an ash heap? He ends up with nobody respecting him. Nobody in the whole story respects him? He's despised? You know, that looks good in a biblical verse or in Plato's Republic, the just man is universally despised. But in real life, nobody wants to be universally despised. And if God is part of our real life and history, God shares the concern.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:47:48,560 ] Suppose you think you're representing the divine intention in this story of The New York Woman in this local temple of fighting to oust a guy who doesn't belong there before he disgraces the whole Jewish presence in that county.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:48:18,340 ] So when God says for you to regain your honor, he's also by implication, that's a way of regaining God's honor in the temple. Which is in a way, a way of reminding the temple what its true honor consists in. Which is the relation to God.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:48:40,910 ] Yes, I hadn't thought of that, darling, but... Of course, that's the rest of the story. I've stood in there like the Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, preventing a flood tide of dishonor washing over the temple. And these narrow, look over your shoulder at what other people think, but don't look at the grounds for what they think. The evidence which would cause them to think one way or the other, at least in the ideal case, forget about that. Just think of how you seem to be. Think of your most superficial appearance. No. What I was told was: Get down to the rock ribbed truth of the case and make it an honorable place instead of a place where the worst can happen to innocent people. So only God had voice enough to give me that understanding, that intimation, that sense of what is the ground reality here. Why do we have a temple? What are we supposed to honor? Our ethnicity? Come on. You know, we got enough ethnicity in the world. We don't need any more.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:50:23,940 ] Ethnicity on every acre of the planet. We're not here for ethnicity. We're here to honor God to behave honorably in the sight of God. To carry forward a story that has meaning.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:50:42,930 ] And a lot of the role, I mean, of these intuitions and hunches and thoughts that might be God thinking through you are ways of knowing in a given situation what is the honorable thing? What action would support your honor, the divine honor, all in line with each other, hopefully. The honor of the institution. It could be a temple. It could be a college. Or a business or a law firm or something else. Medical practice, but it's not obvious in individual cases.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:51:30,450 ] So that's where you kinda have to, as I often say, have a clarified soul. Clean your palate. You clean your palate so that you can tell what it is. You don't want to just go fighting every fight. That's counterproductive. That brings dishonor and tends to get egotistical at some point where it's just self-assertion. No, no, you can't do that. You've got to rest these other features you might say of one's personality, including the reluctance to go forward. They all have to be put on hold for a bit. First, just to tell, to see, what are you being called upon to do in this situation? Is it to speak up or is it to be quiet? Or is it to support someone else? In a loud way, or in a very quiet way, or what? You know, because human affairs are so complex, there are many options at any given moment.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:53:00:00 ] What are you feeling? I don't know if you have an answer to this. But if you do, I'd be interested in the answer. What do you, at this point in your life, feel if you pay attention to these kinds of registers that we're just talking about—intuitions, intimations, nudges, and thoughts— that could be a divine thinking through you, what do you feel called to do? In the next phase of your life, your work. And here I'm thinking not of Monday, but you know of the coming year, let's say, the kind of time frame of the coming months. You may not have gone through the process of asking that, or maybe you do have a sense of it.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:53:58,710 ] I have a rather unfilled in, it's a sort of, at this point, merely abstract in the sense that there's a category there, but the living cells that support the outline are not filled in. I have a sense about women it's, I think at first, I know at first, you have suggested it to me because in your sense of what I'm good at and what I might know about, I seem to have a friendly attitude toward women. I seem to be on the side of women. I don't seem catty or unidentified with women, and yet I have... And I have, of course, both pre-dated the feminist movement of the 70s and known some of the leading women or path breakers in that movement and written about one of the first philosophical articles about that venture forward in history but also lived long enough inside that development in the culture to see that it's leading ideas perhaps supplied by Simone de Beauvoir's groundbreaking book, The Second Sex, Le Deuxième Sex.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:56:16,900 ] Its leading ideas came from a man, Sartre, that doesn't mean they're wrong. But they were Sartrean existential notions, and the basic claim of Sartre's work is that we make ourselves up. We can be, we are free to be whatever we decide to be. So, De Beauvoir made this rather misleading claim, that women don't have to live their traditional lives as the subordinates or second sex. They can be airline pilots. They can lead combat missions. They can invent and discover radium.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:57:14,940 ] They can come upon the great formulas of contemporary physics E=mc² square and whatever the latest is, they can be sir isaac newton a couple of centuries back. There's nothing we girls can't do. Sort of like Wonder Woman comics in my childhood. You can do it if you think you can, girls. Well, whether you think you can or not, girls, you're going to have a menstrual period once a month. So you better get the equipment that won't go through your clothes. You're going to be impregnable as a man is not.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:58:02,640 ] And if you get pregnant out of wedlock it changes your life irreversibly, whatever you decide to do about it. There are vulnerabilities that the feminine soul has been developed to cope with. It's different to be a woman than to be a man, if you doubt me magically become a woman for a week. You know, they have this children's book, The Prince and the Pauper. The prince decides to be a pauper for a week, and the pauper decides to be a prince. Okay, decide to be a woman. Well, you can't. So, too bad. And women are told, have been told by the second wave feminists, decide to be men. I'm not an anti-feminist. I'm not saying this cynically or in a reactionary, go back to Kirche, Küche, Kinder, and go back to the kitchen and the church and your kids.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 00:59:29,990 ] All those K-places. No. But the feminist revolution, if that's what it was, this feminist half-turn has been made possible by contraception, improved medical care, some availability of abortion, excuse the word. I'm very against abortion, except if you need an abortion. In which case some of my grown-up students in night school, I had a night class. The students were mostly black adults, and they were quite insightful about certain realities that are not officially acknowledged in white life. And one of them— that I remember vividly— was this: One of my students was a nurse and remembers helping a well-known opponent, woman opponent of abortion, get an abortion. Okay, and then go back to the, you know, to the public anti-abortion life that you've been leading so beautifully. Women have all kinds of concerns that are quite real. They have a much more limited period of time in which they can have children. More limited than a man's span of time.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 01:01:18,480 ] In the act that impregnates women or not, if they have contraceptive barriers, they are receiving a sperm-bearing donor that if their eggs are not protected by a barrier, will impregnate them. Other things being equal. So these are the ABCs of a woman's life. And every mother with a daughter tries to spell them out. You know, the good times are over when puberty sets in, the onset of puberty is the end of freedom. You can't run and play the way the boys did and the way you did before all these particular encumbrances enveloped your plans, so you have to adjust your plans and don't lie about it.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 01:02:32,200 ] The other thing that is not acknowledged and was decried by the second wave feminists, such as Betty Friedan, is that there is such a thing as a successful woman, successful at being a woman. And, it's a type of success that women recognize in each other. Corresponding to it is the failure at being a woman. And it doesn't matter whether you got a Nobel Prize or esteem from your colleagues at Cambridge University or Oxford, if you failed at being a woman, it's obvious to other women.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 01:03:37,680 ] And men know it, too. They ridicule these successful women, these candidates for the Nobel Prize women, because there's another race that is run by women. And slowly, as the halcyon days of childhood recede into distant memory and one is trying to get one's bearings in a new race that has to do with being a woman. That nobody told you about when you exited from the playpen and learned to walk on your two legs. They didn't tell you you're going to have to be a woman.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 01:04:26,730 ] I mean, nobody told me anyway. People recognize success and failure in the woman race. And you might say it's competitive in a very specific sense. And I'll spell out exactly what I'm thinking of.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 01:04:52,990 ] Two out of three of the women I knew Who were. successful in the woman race survived their husbands and became widowed. And these successful widows were then unprotected by the men in their respective lives, and they're less successful at being a woman. Sisters, biological sisters, also widowed or single, moved in on them and captured their womanly energies, and got a long, slow into old age revenge on their more successful womanly sisters.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 01:05:55,920 ] I saw it happen in two out of three cases. Didn't happen in my mother's case. It could have, perhaps. She was awful smart, and the sister who could have inflicted that on her lived in Jerusalem, not New York and happened to be a highly successful, not necessarily successful as a woman, but in many respects, very respected woman in Israeli society. So my mother, both because of her own womanly skills, and because of the cards she'd been dealt by life was the only survivor with womanhood intact, of the three women I knew in childhood who excelled at the art of being women.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 01:07:05,240 ] Well, I think… It could be that when I encouraged this project, and of course, I didn't know you had all the things to say that you've just said, but I knew these essential things that I mentioned at the beginning. Your deep affection for how women are and that you approach them as they are in life, in real life, not through a theory of some kind. All these other things are theories that are inflicted on women. And there is a kind of divine aspect here. A lot of these theories— especially the more utopian ones— are ones in which, well, God didn't set it up right. And so they're trying to fix the way God's world works and make it some very different way that they make themselves the creator and redo everything, to fit their own theories they've come up with.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 01:08:07,210 ] You do not do that, and it could well be that this is another way of speaking up for God's honor. It's God's honor in how God created women, which also implicates how God created men. I find it myself, even though a man, very easy to be critical of men because they're often very poor at relationships and they don't realize what a prize they have when they have a good woman who loves them and that they should do nothing to spoil that, and yet they routinely, that very often do things to spoil it. Well, anyway, but this is the world God created. What is it? God created man? What's the literal biblical phrase? 'Male and female created he them.' 'Male and female he created them.'
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 01:09:00,160 ] In his image. God created them. In his image.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 01:09:03,080 ] And so there it is, and you're defending God in this, you know, funny way. I just suspect God is saying, go, Abigail. Anyway, this is a good place, I think, to conclude. And we look forward to further thoughts on this topic that we'll find some venue for you, of course, have your column you post, Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column, so people can... join you there, but thank you for this intimate dialogue, sweetheart.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal [ 01:09:40,950 ] Thank you, darling.
Scott Langdon [ 01:10:10,140 ] Thank you for listening to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. Subscribe for free today wherever you listen to your podcasts and hear a new episode every week. You can hear the complete dramatic adaptation of God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher by Jerry L. Martin by beginning with episode one of our podcast and listening through its conclusion with Episode 44. You can read the original true story in the book from which this podcast is adapted, God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher, available now at amazon.com, and always at godanautobiography.com. Pick up your own copy today. If you have any questions about this or any other episode, please email us at questions@godanautobiography.com, and experience the world from God's perspective as it was told to a philosopher. This is Scott Langdon. I'll see you next time.