I tell my writing students all the time that good writing is about being authentic, showing vulnerability, having a strong point-of-view. I am feeling vulnerable at the moment, as if I have lost my bearings and am struggling to locate my center. What does it even mean to be a man any longer?

I am not a naive or innocent person, I was a reporter for a good long time in some dreadful places, I saw horrific things all the time that damaged me and made me realize I needed to change, and see different things. So I became a book writer instead, and eventually moved to the country.

I felt safe and smug up here, I am not feeling that now. I feel at times now  that I am losing perspective, my grip on the world around me is sometimes slippery. I am stunned quite often by what I am seeing, disbelieving and uncomprehending. That is a new feeling for arrogant me.

I grew up in a Jewish working class neighborhood in Providence, R.I., although I left the faith a long time ago, I was raised by a Jewish middle-class family, my grandparents were devout orthodox Jews, my neighborhood was overwhelmingly Jewish, with some Irish families sprinkled in.

I have never identified with Jewish ritual, I joined a Quaker Meeting when I was a  teenager and have been comfortable in that faith, although I  rarely go to Meeting any longer. The Quakers mirror my values more than any other faith I know, they helped to shape my ideas of morality, as did Judaism. They actually taught me what it really means to be a Christian.

I am not easily shocked, but I was made speechless once more by the revelations yesterday about our now disgraced Attorney Genera of New York Statel, who was accused of savagely abusing four different women in both physical and emotional ways.  These ways  made me physically ill, my stomach had the decency to weep and cry out.

Things have come a long way since the me.too movement. This deeply troubled and broken man, a hero to many people before yesterday,  resigned just a few  hours after he was accused. Nobody doubted the stories of these women, meticulously documented by the New Yorker Magazine.

He just sputtered a bit and left. His life was destroyed in minutes, everything he had worked to gain lost. And it seemed to be pure justice.

It seems that nothing in my previous life – I thought I saw a lot in my previous life – prepared me for what i am learning about the violence men have done and are doing  and have been doing to women. As a reporter, I saw abused women in court and in hospitals all the time, I know how much violence is done to women in America.

But I am jarred quite personally and deeply as I learn every day about the depth and range and  arrogance and brutality revealed by the women now coming forward to tell their awful tales about the things men have done to them.

I will be frank, it is bewildering to me to see how many of these men are Jewish, especially in Hollywood and New York.

I have had my differences with Judaism, but it always seemed grounded in a moral perspective, Jews are taught early on to love the earth, to value education, to help the poor and the powerless. That was the one thing i loved about Judaism, and perhaps the one thing I took from it.

When I was a boy, we didn’t talk about the Chosen People, we talked about the Chosen Boys. The special ones, the gifted ones, the beautiful ones. They were different from us. They were not bookish or pale. They were smart, athletic, handsome, they always got the grades and they got the women. They were adored, the light always seemed to fall on them. They were heading to Harvard and Yale (I was  not), teachers fawned on them, the angels seemed to swirl around their heads.

It was only later I learned that Chosen Boys were not only Jewish. Every culture and faith and race had some.

Needless to say, I was not a Chosen Boy, I did not do well in school, I was pimply and skinny, could not dribble a basketball or swing a bat, had no friends and girls ran  from me as if I had fleas. Maybe I did. But I did have a sense of right and wrong, my own idea of morality, my own innate gift of empathy. I thought about it all the time, second guessed every decision, looked in the mirror daily to see if I liked the person I saw there.

So here we are, it’s the Chosen Boys I keep seeing in the news, keep reading about, who are slapping and beating and raping women, who e-mail their penises to children on the Internet, who expose themselves to the young women who work for them, or  drug and rape them, or threaten and intimidate them. It seemed to me they had everything, it seems to me they had nothing. It seems to me they have nothing now.

The Chosen Boys are now the Predator Men.

It seems to me that the world is turning itself upside down, hopefully in the cause of long overdue justice and decency. If that’s where it lands, it was worth every second. Men have blown their shot at ruling the world.

Faith seems to have failed these powerful, educated men, almost all of whom claim to be religious. Faith did not guide them or inspire them.

There is something enduring about Judaism, something noble, something smug, something superior. I remember my grandmother telling me once, Jews don’t beat their women. Jewish men don’t do that. That, she thought, was something only gentiles did. She never lived to learn that this was something all men do, of every faith.

There is something smug about all of the major faiths, they all believe they talk directly to God. It seems they are all incorrect.

it never pays to be smug, we are all too human. These Predator Men teach us this every day. Their falls are swift and brutal and Biblical. So many chickens coming home…Don’t cry for the Chosen Boys And Men, they will find their way back, they always do, that’ sone of the laws fo the earth. But it will never be the same.

I know these things I’m talking about are a series of crimes and sufferings that belong to women, not to me.  Who can possibly calculate the damage done to women all these centuries? The lives diminished, degraded, brutalized, exploited,  lost forever.

This has gone on forever, and exists everywhere. I have no right to complain about anything, this is not my tragedy, not my suffering. I’ve been going blindly along.

But I am struggling to grasp the dimensions and cruelty of what I  see almost every day. Aren’t they almost all Chosen Men, these social monsers? In a small town deli today the wife of the butcher was nearly crying talking about Bill Cosby. “He was the real father of our country, wasn’t he?,” she pleaded, hoping for commiseration. “What happened to Dr. Huxtable?,” she asked. Nobody knew what to say.

I pray it is cleansing and healing, and that it brings peace and justice to the countless victims, most of whom still  dare not speak up. I think this revolution is for real, I think this one won’t fade away. Mostly because I know now there is an inexhaustible supply of damaged men to still face their reckoning, I suspect none of us will live long enough to hear all of the stories of all of their crimes. Every time I think we are nearing the end, I am reminded we are just at the beginning. This is not just a women’s problem, this is a men’s problem.

I can’t grasp the moral emptiness of an educated, successful, powerful man who would slap a woman he supposedly loved so hard she bled from her ears. I can’t comprehend a man who calls employees to his home and walk around naked. Or lures them into the shower and shows them his penis. I can’t fathom a man who shows unspeakable brutality to a woman by hitting her and calling her a whore,  a man who has built a political career on fighting abuse and speaking out on behalf of the rights of women.

Another Chosen Boy fallen and disgraced.

I always knew this was wrong. Almost every man I ever knew this was wrong, or so I believed. I guess I didn’t really have any idea what most men knew then, or know now. I guess I never made it as a real man..

I was not a Chosen Boy and had no great love for my father, but I will say for  him that he would have beaten me bloody if I harmed a woman or another human being. It was wrong, it was so clear it was wrong.

I wonder if hypocrisy is a flaw or a biological trait in many men.

It is, in my view, the lowest form of life.

I wonder if faith means anything to people any longer, or if it  ever did.

There is  not a major religion on the earth which does not preach that the savage mistreatment of other people is wrong and immoral. Christianity teaches that, the Koran  teaches that, so does the Old Testament, so does the Dalai Lama. In our world, sexual predators are not only tolerated, but loved.

Does faith mean a thing when it comes to truth and morality?

We live in lies, we accept them and expect them.

Around me,  I see the pride of the Jewish middle class  and the pride of many other faiths committing the worst and most evil degradations upon women. I see Muslim teenagers slaughtering innocents all over the world. I see vast numbers of Catholics ignoring Pope Francis’s exhortations to save Mother Earth and be tolerant of one another. I  see Evangelic Christians who only believe lies, and do so in the name of loving Jesus Christ, who always told the truth, even unto pain of death.

When the Attorney General of New York State slaps a lover so hard she has to go to the hospital, does faith play any role? Did anyone teach him about ethics or morality? Does morality live anywhere inside of his head, these ancient, timeless, boring and cliched notions of morality and good? Did they every matter, or did people just pretend that they did?

Does a monster’s heart ever rest?

I admit, uncharacteristically, to being flummoxed, completely stumped as to how the men I have been reading about for many months justify themselves and look in the mirror every morning. How brave and giving are these women who come forward with their gut-wrenching stories. They are the heroes we have all been waiting for.

I just can’t fathom it. I have nothing very insightful to say about it.

These men are the best of the best, yet they are the worst of the worst. How does one square that?

It must have to do with power, it really does corrupt and corrode, we really should be aware of its power to undermine and destroy.

I don’t know how that happens, how that works. People tell me we are all human, but that seems to fall short. People who slap lovers hard in the face or rape them are not humans, they are something else. It is an  insult to humanity to call them human. They are inhuman.

I am coming to see that faith is truly an internal matter for me, not an external one. I could never do what these men do, I cannot comprehend it. Has any religion told my heart what is right or  wrong?  Am I too old to see  this all clearly? Or too dumb? Or too blind? None of the options are good.

When I go into my heart, I know what is really wrong and right. The heart gives me the eyes to see the reality of my existence. The purity of heart allows me to see more clearly.

From the heart arise deep and unknowable instincts, it is the center of perception and understanding, the source of good and moral  decisions. My God lives there.

The heart is the central and unifying organ of my personal life, it shows me right and wrong, and calls upon me to respect myself, and to show empathy and respect the dignity of others.  And to do good, not harm.

So now, as I struggle to understand the things I see and read almost every day, I’ll go inward to the heart and search for understanding there. I don’t think it exists for me in the world beyond, it is nowhere in the news.

So there it is, I am here to tell you what I don’t know, cannot comprehend, do not understand. I am beginning to believe that I will never know, never understand these Chosen Men. They had it all and threw it all  away just to dominate or cruelly hurt another soul.

But at the other end of my life, I do finally see one thing: I am grateful not to be one of them. I might have actually been one of them and didn’t see it.