The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ by Andrew Klavan

Author:Andrew Klavan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2016-09-19T16:00:00+00:00

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die:

Into the Valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

The professor, a mild-mannered woman in her forties, was discussing the poem with gentle enthusiasm when a very serious young lady in a very serious pair of spectacles rose from one of the front seats and demanded angrily, “How can we even read this poem when all it does is glorify war?”

The poor professor’s face went blank. Clearly, she was a product of the old school. She studied literature because she loved literature not because she wanted to use it to preen herself on her own political virtue. She had never had to defend the beauty of beauty before, or the wisdom of wisdom. She smiled, embarrassed. She shrugged weakly. “I see what you mean,” she said.

At the back of the auditorium, I leapt to my feet, appalled. Here was a poem I had actually read—and I loved it. I still do. Because it’s great. Inarticulate with passion, I began to slap my open volume of Tennyson with the back of my hand, reading the opening lines aloud and saying, “Listen! Listen to this! Listen! ‘Half a league, half a league, half a league onward—all in the valley of Death rode the six hundred.’ You can hear the horses! You can—listen!—you can feel the courage and the madness, everything, it’s all there . . .” I babbled on like that for a few more seconds and then dropped back into my seat, blushing, feeling like an idiot.

The professor made a bland gesture in my general direction as if to say, “Yes . . . yes . . . I suppose it’s something of that sort,” and then continued with her lecture. Such survivors from the old days could raise no defense against the postmodern onslaught.

Myself, I could see the logic behind postmodernism and its moral relativism. Much of what we think is good—individual freedom, equality before the law, tolerance for conflicting opinions—is learned from Western culture and taken on faith. Why should we not accept that other cultures with other values and other faiths might be just as legitimate as our own? I could see the logic—and yet, my senses rebelled. To abandon those basic principles seemed false to something equally basic within me. It seemed an act of violence against my idea of what a human being was. I was torn between the intellectual fashion of the day and my own deepest convictions.

That’s part of the reason why Hamlet obsessed me so: it was the story of a man who could not decide what was right, what was true. I read it first in a Shakespeare course, then read it again and again and watched many of the movie versions too. One scene—the “mad scene”—haunted me endlessly. Hamlet is pretending to be insane—and may actually be a little insane at that point. When he’s asked what he’s reading, he answers weirdly, “Words, words, words.” He talks about how his

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