‘I better not call Betty’ — My long path to unreasonable optimism about the conflict

Kevin R Vixie

Editor: Some weeks back we asked mathematician Kevin R. Vixie to write up the story of his disaffection from Zionism. “I immediately agreed,” Vixie relates. “But then I began to wonder how I could craft such a story while avoiding the self-absorption into which such personal stories often collapse. In the end, I decided I could do that by telling the parts of the story I felt most deeply, and by doing that as simply as possible.”

It began, I suppose, with the family that I was born into.  My father was a gifted musician and a brilliant polymath who was rarely appreciated for who he was. My mother was a compassionate, morally ambitious and courageous person who had, as a young single woman, started a nursing school in Africa in the time period 1945-1950.

They were both Seventh Day Adventist.

As a young child, I was constantly exposed to great music, whether through the rather impressive stereo system my dad fed by constant trips to Rose records in Chicago or through frequent concerts at Orchestra Hall and trips backstage with my parents after most concerts. I still remember shaking hands and speaking with musicians like Eugene Ormandy and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf.

Fairly early on I chose the violin as my instrument.

My first memory of thinking about myself in relation to Judaism was when my paternal step-grandmother told me that unless I was Jewish, there was no hope of me being any good in music. My naive response was to try to prove to myself that I was Jewish enough to qualify.

What I found out from my mother was that her father’s family was in some hazy unrecorded way actually German and Jewish, but they had assimilated and converted long ago. 

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In addition to my obsession with science and mathematics — I studied these on my own, at home, for the period of time most others would have been in high school — I also studied spiritual ideas and teachings of unusual Adventist teachers, teachers who took very different viewpoints and essentially introduced me to a mode of thinking about truth that is not unlike some Jewish modes of thought.

In college, I became friends with a Messianic Jew. He preached to me a rather rabidly racist, Zionistic message, a message to which I was very receptive. For it felt like it was a place I might fit.

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While I never traveled to Israel, nor took action in line with the Zionistic message I consumed, this is not so surprising given my theoretical bias. It was not until later that I began balancing this tendency out. For me, the conception eclipsed the actualization of ideas. If I could conceive of something clearly, I would move onto something else. So I was less inclined to action than others in a similar position. By the time I was developing a more action-based mode, I was no longer convinced that Zionism was something I identified with. (The first stage of the transition to a more action or experimental mode was my teaching of things I conceived or discovered. This was followed by the creation of things from wood and eventually metal, in a shop that is now fairly substantial. There was also the tendency to try to get others involved in making real the thing I conceived and this was a big part of my creating communities or groups I led or helped lead.)

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After college, I went to graduate school in mathematics, but the effects of my parents dying (my mom had died in my last year of homeschool high school and my dad died my last year in college) had left me with deep issues: where did I belong? Into that void some cousins stepped with a message of radical spiritual ecstasy and belonging. Of course, where else was this based but Oregon, the home to every species of offshoot, cult, eccentric viewpoint that one might want to delve into.

But just before dropping out of graduate school to associate myself with the group, I remember being accosted on the street in Seattle by a young, ultra-orthodox Jew who was looking for wayward Jews. I was of course intrigued and warmed by the attention. He first asked me if my background was at all Jewish and I said yes. Then he asked me whether it was my mother or father’s side. When I said mother, his interest heightened. Of course he next asked whether it was her mother’s or her father’s side and when I said her father’s side it was instantly as if I didn’t exist. He didn’t see me any more, instantly losing all interest in talking to me. I was intensely offended. 

Jumping ahead thorough many experiences in Oregon, I eventually started making my way back to universities and research. I met my wife. After we were married her father told her that his family was Jewish in background, though they had assimilated thoroughly enough that they survived the Nazis in Poland.

I was running a research lab in Neurosurgery in Portland, Oregon, and I became friends with a beautiful soul in the department to whom I made some rather uninformed Zionistic statement. Very kindly, she said “you need to read something” and she recommended some books that opened my eyes to the Palestinian side of the conflict.

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The result was fundamental and thorough. It was essentially my waking up to the fact that political things as presented by the mainstream are often different from the true state of affairs. That this was the case, I was prepared to believe because I had seen it before, in religion, in medicine, and in pieces of science. The fact that I had grown up in southern New Mexico, surrounded by many eccentrics, also biased me away from rejecting ideas simply because they were different, or even strange. And when my parents delved into alternative medicine, the issues, reactions and realizations thus opened to me were quite transformative. Even the rather unusual views of the Old Testament that evolved for me as a child and teenager had left me with a sense that the status quo, the consensus, was often flawed.

Now David Barsamian’s interviews had a deeper impact. Now I began to make a distinction between the pieces of Judaism that I identified with and Israel as a project containing some very disturbing elements.

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At the same time as my discovery of the other side of the story, my cousin, a member of that religious offshoot mentioned earlier, gave me some inspired advice. He watched me struggling with various emotional issues and he told me that he had seen me benefit deeply from walkabouts in the woods and mountains. He advised me to do this everyday, without fail. We lived near the medical school in Portland, and there were enormous forested parks within a two minute walk from my house. So I began to do exactly what he suggested, spending hours there every day.

This began a profound, ongoing transformation and deepening. In those woods I learned that I was a mathematician in a very deep way that I had never seen before. There was a flow I could connect to that brought everything alive, that transformed my seeing. This soon led back to graduate school in mathematics and that led to a position at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1998.

A comment on this critical piece of my journey: while religion is a definite turn-off for so many, and even spirituality is something many feel is best discussed in private or not at all, spirituality is so important that I think we must gently insist that it be talked about, that it be included in any heartfelt narrative. The simultaneity of my discovery of who I was, of the reality of a living walk that illuminates everything and my waking up to the universality of the sleepwalking state that so many exist in, is not a coincidence. 

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Moving to Los Alamos felt very much like a homecoming. Working as a mathematician, I was warmed by the sense of belonging — I was a part of community of similarly-disposed people, people who valued the intellect and mathematics. That was the first impression of the place. The natural setting deepened my sense of belonging. I lived next to a forested canyon, as did many of the town’s inhabitants, and I used these canyons for my walkabouts. Eventually, I would sometimes work in them, taking a cell phone and small laptop.

The physicist who hired me had been well known in graduate school for his Marxism, but by the time he hired me, he was no longer a communist of any sort, having renounced the dalliance as a youthful folly. Now, though he was still quite liberal and a fan of Molly Ivins (he had been a graduate student in Texas), he was just another very sharp staff member who had few qualms about working on weapons. To be fair, he and I were both persuaded by the argument that while a weapons-free world would be great, the facts were that Los Alamos needed sharp people to keep weapons safe, to maintain the stockpile and do other tasks that were not direct escalations of the nuclear threat. He was also a bit of a hawk — in some ways — on Israel. In addition to being kind to me and a great mentor, he and I would also get into arguments on various issues. On one occasion he gave me a ride home at 5:00 and came into the house for 5 minutes to finish a conversation on Israel. After about an hour, he looked at his watch and said “I need to call Betty”, but he didn’t and we kept talking. This was repeated every hour or so until about 11:00 pm after which he would look at his watch and say, “I better not call Betty”.

He left at 1:00 am. 

I continued to read, books like “Blood Brothers” by Chacour and “Yellow Wind” by Grossman. But I had to take breaks, for I would get very worked up by the injustice and this would turn into physical stress.

At the same time, I became interested in moving to academia and away from a connection to weapons. But while my interest and connection to Middle East issues was instinctive and deeply felt, the transition to a position that opposed the idea of working on things related to war, came only after the “war on terror” gathered full strength.

Over my time at the Lab, my research focus shifted from dynamical systems to data analysis and geometric measure theory, with applications to image analysis. Of course, one of the big demands for image analysis was improved face recognition. But this also bothered me, because I knew that improved capabilities here would inevitably lead to abuses of power and further invasions of privacy. The result of this viewpoint was that after doing something successful in face recognition with three other colleagues, I moved to other research.

And as I moved gradually away from the center of the lab, the sense of belonging started to fade. The fact that the atmosphere for science was also sliding downhill also encouraged me to think about leaving. The increasing focus on profits for the lab contract-holder, rather than cutting edge science, added even more of an impetus to leave. I was already in the Theoretical Division, the academic portion of the lab, so the next natural step was to actually move to academia.

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In 2008, we left Los Alamos and moved to Washington State University in Pullman, Washington.

Soon after arriving at WSU, I arranged for Chris Hedges to visit Pullman and give several talks. Since that time, I have become increasingly aware of the real complexity in social and political arenas, and of people like Norman Finkelstein, Marc Ellis, and Avrum Burg.

Also important is the growing influence of many students from the Middle East who, by their very presence and reasonableness, more deeply convince me of the absurdity of seeing everything through a Zionistic lens.

These influences, that now include alternative thinkers in many areas, have combined with my own discoveries from the walkabouts, as well as other significant experiences like my brother’s recovery from drug and alcohol addiction. The result is an outlook that has transformed everything, from the way I think about my main focus of mathematics research and teaching to how I think about the environments I create for discovery and connection.

For reasons I am just beginning to fully grasp, the discovery of courageous individuals promoting unpopular truths — people like Hedges, Finkelstein, Ellis and Burg — has had a very powerful effect on me. It gives me an unreasonable optimism. And that is what we need right now — unreasonable optimism. For dangers loom in so many directions that we would freeze into reaction and even inaction if we did not have non-rational tools to escape them. (Note that I did not say irrational tools.)

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Much of my exposure to writers and thinkers on these subjects ends up being impressionistic in nature. I am very intuitive and I approach even the deep technical work I do in mathematics this way. I want to know the core, the fundamental insight or insights from which everything flows. In listening to, watching or reading, Hedges, Finkelstein, Ellis, Burg, Chomsky, Tony Judt, and others, the insights emerge in ways that are difficult to describe accurately. Others sometimes gets frustrated with the way in which I read books, reading this piece and that piece, a little here, a little there, in a very nonlinear fashion. But the result is a view that I find useful. Of course there are some books that I read in a more traditional way, from beginning to end. But even there, what I retain is more impressionistic in nature.

For example, what stands out from that first book on Palestine that I read over 15 years ago now (whose title I can’t recall) are the descriptions of the massacre at Deir Yassin, the Stern Gang and Irgun terrorist groups, of the displacements of Palestinians, and the war in 1948. Also in this picture is the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Sheikh Ekrima Sabri, and the fact that he allied himself with the Nazis. Zooming forward in time, Hedges impressed me deeply with an authenticity and a depth of feeling that permeates his insights into war, human nature and conflicts in religion. Chomsky intrigues me with lots of facts I never knew, while Burg takes a courageous position that is far-reaching in its implications. Because of the fact that they all speak of things that were at various stages of realization in myself, all of them make me feel less lonely, like there is a place in which I am not singular in what I see or feel.

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The courage shown by those who see the truth and uncover it for others, is a courage that exists because it abandons self-care for a deep focus on being, on doing, on creating, and on sharing. And trusting, turning away from self-care to cultivation of the creative and connective, is the only antidote for the self-absorption that I opened this story worrying about.

The place of belonging that Israel once represented for me has dissolved into the realization that the community I was seeking began in the woods, many years ago, and continues in every person I meet who has thrown off those shackles and blindness, embracing trust and generosity. In this realization, I begin to see that the Land I am seeking begins here, now, where I am, where you are.

And in that Land, even the strangers are welcome.