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When I lived in Kenya on a hillside not far from l.ake Victoria, the world seemed never closer and also never further away. Here the earth turned under my feet, birds sang in towering trees, and goats were tethered to posts for slaughter. The neighborhood abounded with all things human: passion and jealousy, marriage and death, births, births, always more births, and friendship and religious antagonisms.

But the nearest telephone was two valleys away. I read no newspaper and once a week bought a magazine. Daily news came from the Voice of Kenya, items generally about President Kenyatta attending one agricultural fair or another throughout the country. Letters from home arrived periodically.

That which seemed to be vital to know about immediately while in the United States could wait for learning. Most important, it seemed, was that which was nearest at hand. Disasters, obituaries, and political events made no difference whether I heard of them instantly or days afterward. What influence I might have, the action I might choose to take, would have to wait a bit. In the larger scheme of things, it was a realistic assessment of my place in life.

Breathlessness wasn't a constant condition, anxiety wasn't related to the state of the world.

Today I need to remind myself of that time, that place. Knowing shouldn't be a burden but a source of power. The lure of television pictures, bulletins and late-breaking news is compelling. But I also recognize how easily information can overwhelm and how much of what we think we need to know isn't so.

I tell this to myself every morning as I read two newspapers and every evening as I watch the network news. But the news be-fore going to bed? Never. I want lullabies before sleep, not horror stories.

Writer Pat Conroy grew up in a home with a violent father. But it was his mother who provided the counter-weight to the hatred spewed by his father.

When Pat was a boy, his mother read aloud to him. One of the books was The Diary of Anne Frank. Conroy relates that he fell in love with Anne and became hysterical when, at the end of the book, he learned of her fate. "And then my mother said something that affected me my en-tire life. She said she wanted us to become the kind of family that would hide Jews."

Exactly so, I thought. That is the kind of families we all need to become - families who risk all in order to save from certain death the lives of people who may be strangers.

Today we don't have a government which is deporting people to gas chambers, but that doesn't lessen the need for us to stand up bravely against injustice. Anti-Semitism isn't a relic of the past. The venom is poured daily.

Racism, America's Achilles' heel, is more virulent than it has been in many years. To be black in our country is frequently a heavy burden to bear. A burning cross is an obvious manifestation, but it also affects the relations between races in the most insidious and sometimes unconscious fashion.

People of good will are called upon to express their courage. Being moral is more than saying nice things or being a pleasant, inoffensive person. It necessitates the kind of character which Conroy's mother hoped for in her own family. And, as with Conroy, all it takes is one person to articulate the ideal for a child, an ideal whose pull ultimately outweighs the brutal power of an abusive father.

Riding the subway in Munich, I was surprised to find a stop at Dachau. In my mind, concentration camps existed in deep forests, far from urban centers. But there it was, accessible by the metro, whizzing by weary commuters.

Despite its nearness to the city, my host said that during the Nazi period he knew virtually nothing about the camp, except that to ask about it would bring government force down upon the inquirer. So ignorance prevailed.

And what ignorance the camp, now museum, reveals. The Nazis kept meticulous records at this camp, unlike most others which they wanted to consign to invisibility forever. Here they noted their procedures and photographed their experiments, so that these advancements in murder techniques could be duplicated at more extensive and horrible places. At this the first concentration camp they tried out the shower rooms, executioners' ropes and ovens.

Yet what remains in my mind more vividly than anything else is the photograph not of children and mothers but of a political prisoner wearing a pilot's helmet. This man, not a Gypsy or Jew but a socialist, served as an experimental subject to determine the amount of pressure the skull can withstand. The picture shows him clutching his head just moments before his death.

I often think about that subway, that camp and that picture. I wonder what it is today that I refuse to look at as I go about my business. And I wonder how much I am like my German host. What is it that I won't see? What is it that I refuse to ask?

Philosopher Hans Jonas in his book he Imperative of Responsibility notes that the perennial fate of ethics is that the negative is so much clearer than the positive. By this he means that it is relatively easy to identify bad actions and bad conditions. This makes it possible to readily choose what to condemn. The more difficult task of ethics is, once having abolished the morally scandalous, knowing what the positive consists of.

This insights helps to explain, I think, the reason why it is easier to mobilize against something than it is to organize to create something new. It also explains why people given to ethical sensitivity are often critics rather than celebrants. Certainly oppression and injustice need protesting against. But this only makes the constructive task more urgent. What kind of world do we really want and can we be the people to make such a world?

We need to balance both sides of the ethical equation: we need to change what is morally repugnant and at the same time we need to honor the human spirit. For this reason, on any given day we may picket and protest, dance and sing, condemn and praise. Our dual responsibility is to undo what present harm is being perpetrated and to hold a vision of what may be. This we do by celebrating the human condition both in frailties and nobility.

Non-theistic religions are best known in Asia. There we find Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism.

Confucianism can be viewed as the religion of human society7 Taoism that of nature and Buddhism the religion of the psyche. Buddhism starts with the premise that we all suffer and proceeds to detail the manner in which such suffering can be alleviated. One such step is known as "right speech." Buddhism correctly points to the essential importance of speaking rightly. To speak rightly may be a path towards liberation but perhaps more importantly it is necessary for human relations. The cultivation of ethics requires that we speak rightly, honestly and fairly. This is so not only for our own good and not only for the good of those with whom we speak but, as Bertrand de Jouvenal said, "The elementary political process is the action of mind upon mind through speech."

Speaking is a political act. Through speech we influence others. Deceit, lies, dissembling are forms of coercion and the unfair use of force. Respect for the dignity of each individual requires that right speech become a necessity not only for personal relations but for political affairs as well. Without right speech we are less than free. Without honest and plain speech a people can't be free.

I think about this when I listen to politicians, some of whom, it seems, have lost sight of this basic proposition for a democratic society. Free minds thrive on honest speech. All minds are put to sleep under the weight of lies.

Nora Ellen Groce ends her book Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language. Hereditary Deafness on Martha's Vineyard, by writing, "The most striking fact about these deaf men and women is that they were not handicapped because no one perceived their deafness as a handicap. As one woman said to me, 'You know, we didn't think anything special about them. They were just like any one else. When you think about it, the Island was an awfully nice place to live.' Indeed it was."

Accepting and acknowledging differences without smug superiority is a difficult task. The people of Martha' s Vineyard did it because deafness was so commonplace as to define the norm. Everyone learned sign language not to help out 'the poor unfortunates' but because in order to communicate everyone needed to know sign language.

To understand the world in another's way is different than 'helping' those in need. No one wants to be patronized, but we all want our uniqueness to be honored. Being patronized is withering. Feeling and acting morally superior is a kind of spiritual death.

A challenge is avoiding being moralistic on the one hand, and indifferent to special needs of people on the other. But anyone who said that learning how to be decent people was an easy thing wasn't telling the truth.

Julian Barnes said that as a journalist his task was to simplify, but as a novelist his task was to complicate. What, I wondered, is the task of a religious leader?

Henry Neumann, long the leader of the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture until his death in 1966, summarized the role of religious leaders as that of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. I have seen this idea expressed elsewhere, and I doubt that it was original with Dr. Neumann. Nevertheless, it does capture something important about the religious life and contradictions inherent in it.

To comfort the afflicted is akin to the journalist's job. Rough edges are smoothed, complexities reduced to simpler formulations. This is not time for philosophy but some peaceful words of reassurance.

To afflict the comfortable, however, is more like the work of the novelist. It attacks dogma and easy thinking. It assails cant and is an enemy of propaganda. It doesn't aim at peace of mind but truth of mind. Humanity is comprehended in its ambiguities, uncertainties and contradictions. It cannot be contained and remains wild.

Each of needs at one time to be comforted and at other times to be challenged. If we were all the same at the same time, the task would be easier. But each of us is unique and we are at different parts of the journey.

This is why a religious home cannot be merely a business or school or moral hospital. On the one side, our battered souls re-quire something simple; truth, however, demands something different. We cannot maintain our integrity as human beings without also being truthful. Therein lies the dilemma. An appreciation of the problem is one step towards acceptance.

"Morality," writes Romania's exiled poet Andrei Codrescu, has become "the science of indoor living."

Like many poetic pronouncements, the comment is resonant with meaning. It implies that at another time morality also included life outdoors. So today, for example, our relationship with the environment is no longer an ethical matter but a pragmatic one exploring the limits of exploitation.

I also read Codrescu as commenting upon the development of ethics into something resembling science rather than character. We calculate the benefits, weigh the costs. We want to know what the bottom line is. With proper instruments of measure, we believe we can get things just right. But ethics is never completely scientific, for it always involves matters of heart and will, and therefore, must always contend with the hidden recesses of the human psyche.

And I read Codrescu in still another way, mainly, that ethics has moved from the public space into a spot by the fireplace. The link between politics and ethics has been severed so that now we take morality to mean being nice to people, making people feel good, not hurting another' s feeling or giving offence. Peace of mind replaces enlightenment and character formation.

But the fact is that not everything we need to know can be learned in kindergarten but must be worked out slowly with contentious and sometimes grating people, people filled with base motives and desirous of imposing their needs upon others.

Ethics can't be separated from the realm of nature or politics and it can't be made precise. Rather it grows well when nurtured carefully, fully aware of the complexities of life, sensitive to the lives of others, even those we'll never know. It is all too easy for morality to become the science of indoor living. Ethics can't stop at the front door.

Between my house and Jericho Turnpike there are two stop signs. These signs, near an elementary school, have been there at least as long as I have been living in Westbury -more than 20 years. While no auto drive is so routine as to become a habit without thought, two decades on a less than one-mile strip comes close to it. So without much thought, I start to slow down a half block before each sign, come to a halt, and then proceed.

The trouble is that last year one of the signs was moved a block closer to the school. Still, as I travel down Powells Lane, I slow down where the sign used to be and occasion-ally, when my mind is not fully on driving, I make a stop where there is no sign any longer. This habit can be dangerous to others, for I come to a halt where there is seemingly no reason for this action. Not long ago a car passed me as I stood still, waiting for an auto from the side street to enter the main road. This nearly caused an accident and certainly consternation, as my stopping in the lane appeared to be for no good reason.

Of course, the reason wasn't good any longer. What once served me as almost second nature now is an impediment to good driving. How much like other things, I thought. The past provides us with experiences from which to learn. But what was once a useful lesson now is something standing in the way of useful living.

I'm never certain what to hold on to and what to let go of. But I do know that not everything once helpful is any longer. Stopping for a sign that is now elsewhere is not only senseless but dangerous. I need new habits and those I acquire by paying attention to what is in front of me, not what I think is there because it once was.

I have found the following useful questions:

• What do you value most in life?
• Do you live your life consistent with those values and principles?
• If your children could know you fully, would they be pleased with what they found?
• What have you done today that adds to the common good?
• Would the world be a better place if others acted as you do?
• What place do people play in your life, what place objects and things?
• How important is success and what success is important?
• When people let you down, how to you respond to that disappointment?
• Are you dependable, reliable and responsible?
• Do you put your hands where your heart is?