On writing “HYMAN”

Back in the mid-to-late 1970s, when many people in the counterculture took themselves down spiritual paths, I was giving a good deal of agitated thought to issues of human susceptibility and how gurus establish their authority. Our whole generation was being influenced by psychedelic drugs; by the Beatles’ involvement with Transcendental Meditation; by the books of Carlos Castanedas, Ram Dass, Alan Watts, Starhawk and others; by the splintering and suppression of progressive political movements following the end of the Vietnam War; and by the arrival on these shores of numerous Hindu and Vedic gurus. I had been raised as a scientific skeptic, however, and resisted the trend — but not without feeling my worldview deeply challenged by it.

I recall, of example, watching the film Ram Dass: Fierce Grace among an audience of baby boomers who seemed well-acquainted with the Eastern spiritual path. Midway into the film, Ram Dass tells us of his central conversionary experience: his first encounter with his lifelong guru in the Himalayan mountains. Ram Dass recounts how, the night before arriving at the guru’s encampment, he’d had a glorious time stargazing, which evoked thoughts about his recently deceased mother. The next day, the guru’s first words upon meeting him were: Last night you looked at the stars and thought about your mother.

It was this simple parlor trick that precipitated the “ego-death” of a Harvard Ph.D. psychologist and readied him to “be here now”! I was stunned by the transparency of the guru’s ruse — but as Ram Dass on film described his awe at the man’s mind-reading power, the gasps of the audience indicated a shared sense of faith that left me feeling quite alone in my skepticism.

Of course Ram Dass had looked at the stars! I thought. What foreign traveler, apart from a blind person, would not look at the Himalayan night sky and be stunned by the profusion of stars? And stargazing evokes in all of his thoughts about mortality, love, humility, meaning — and mothers! Especially if you’re a young Western man not yet entwined with a family of your own making, and you’re thinking deeply about your past present and future, it’s a safe bet that your thoughts will include your mother! The guru, it seemed to me, had read his visitor like a book, gambled against excellent odds, and hit the jackpot (perhaps with some advance information about Ram Dass’ mother’s death).

To me, any spiritual leader who asserted paranormal powers to blow minds and win converts marked himself as a professional magician, out to make a living. This didn’t mean, however, that such leaders didn’t have the capacity to deeply affect, sometimes in positive ways, their followers — but it did mean that they needed to be approached with suspicion.

Many of the spiritual movements of there 1970s and ‘80s eventually erupted in sexual scandals involving their gurus, which had me not only saying “I told you so,” but cogitating about issues of power and sex. What was the difference, I wanted to understand, between women who go out of their way to sleep with rock stars, athletes, and other charismatic men, and women who were being perceived as exploited and abused — not only by gurus, but also by therapists, professors, and various other male higher-ups.

I didn’t write on the subject until I began creating HYMAN, about thirteen years ago. By then I’d been a “professional Jew,” as an editor and writer and artist working in Jewish organizations for four decades, and I had thought a lot about the ways in which feminist culture, as well as psychedelics and the “I’m-not-religious-but-I’m-spiritual” trope, was transforming and energizing American Judaism. So I invented the character of Hyman — a creative and charismatic Jewish guru who, as the novel unfolds, is being disempowered by old age and by a cohort of women in his movement with whom he has slept over the years.

I couldn’t complete the book while I was working as the editor of Jewish Currents — my workload was way too exhausting and I didn’t really know where the plot was taking me — but once I retired and the #MeToo movement was going full bore, I climbed back into the book to explore this heretical question: Could there be a guru, a man, who sleeps with some of his female followers for their benefit, not for his, and who could be seen as ministering to them the way a sex therapist might? When sex is linked to male leadership and power is it always exploitative and therefore treyf, or is the issue of sex and power more dialectical than that?

I froze the novel’s action in 2012, before #Me Too became a cultural phenomenon with the prosecution of Harvey Weinstein in 2017. (The novel slides back and forth across the past half-century.) I chose the name Hyman as a triple entendre: the name, the membrane, and the “high man.” And I created a nemesis for him, Elly, who hails from the same chasidic background, becomes his wife and then his ex-wife, and never loses her scorn for his movement, his sexual philosophy, his radical sensibility.

The book is out from Ben Yehuda Press and available for a discount (and with free shipping) at my new website. I’m nervous about it being read, but I am proud of the novel and I do — gulp! — stand behind its provocations.