Everyone Said Jonah Miller's Nohum Circles Helped.
By Sonny F. Singer | January 2025
Most of the people I contacted about the Nohum Circles never replied. One asked me to remove a quotation from an old forum post. Another was happy to talk until I mentioned Jonah Miller. Eventually, three former participants agreed to speak with me. Their names have been changed at their request. Their recollections concern gatherings that ended in the late 1980s, and I have not been able to independently verify everything they described.
Elaine attended her first circle in 1986, shortly after her mother died. She was thirty-one, recently divorced, and tired of being told that everything happened for a reason. “Nobody said she was in a better place. Nobody said I’d see her again. They let me say that she was dead and I hated it.” For eight months, she went almost every week. People brought food, the facilitator read passages attributed to Miller, and sometimes the group sat quietly with their eyes closed. What she remembered most was the relief of speaking without someone trying to correct how she felt.
When I asked when the sessions began to feel strange, Elaine took a while to answer. “I don’t think they did while I was there. Afterwards, I started remembering things I should have found strange.” During one period of silence, she had become upset without saying anything. The woman beside her reached for her hand and repeated a phrase Elaine’s mother used to say. “It wasn’t some extraordinary sentence. That’s what my husband keeps telling me. Anyone could have said it.” When I asked what the phrase was, she declined to tell me.
Michael attended another circle between 1987 and 1988. He remembered fluorescent lights, biscuits, and someone regularly having to move a car that was blocking the entrance. “People imagine candles,” he said. “It was just a room.” He could describe where he sat and recall an argument about whether to leave the windows open. What he struggled to remember was how the evenings ended. “I remember arriving. I remember conversations. Then I remember being outside.” He resisted my suggestion that he was describing lost time. “No. I mean I don’t remember anyone saying we were finished.” When I suggested that so many similar evenings might have blurred together, he agreed. Later that night, he emailed a question: Did the others remember leaving? I had not mentioned that anyone else had agreed to speak with me.
David, the third participant, was impatient with supernatural explanations. He believed suggestion and social pressure could account for much of what people remembered. “When somewhere makes you feel understood, you give it the benefit of the doubt,” he said. His own doubts began when he arrived one evening to find a different facilitator in the usual man’s chair. The newcomer referred to the previous week’s discussion, which seemed reasonable enough; David assumed someone had briefed him. Then he brought up a private conversation David had had while washing cups afterwards. “He said, ‘You were telling me about your brother.’ And I had been. But I’d told the other man.”
David interrupted to ask whether they had met. The facilitator laughed, apparently taking it as a joke. When I asked how the others reacted, David said, “They waited for me to finish.” Nobody seemed confused by the exchange. He returned the following week, a decision he still sounded embarrassed about. “I thought I’d made it awkward.” He could no longer remember whether the original facilitator ever came back.
None of the three recalled a formal announcement that the circles were ending. Elaine stopped receiving calls. Michael arrived one evening to find the room locked. David remembered fewer people turning up until, eventually, there was no gathering to attend. Their accounts placed these endings in the late 1980s, but I found no common notice or explanation linking them. From what they described, something that had occupied a regular place in their lives simply stopped.
All three insisted that the circles had helped them, at least for a while. Elaine felt less alone. Michael made friends. David had finally been able to talk about his brother. That was part of what made these conversations difficult: each person was trying to preserve something valuable while describing memories they no longer knew how to interpret. Nearly four decades later, none seemed particularly eager to persuade me of anything. They mostly wanted to know what the others had said.
Before publication, I called Elaine to check a quotation. She asked whether I had found any photographs of the gatherings. I told her I was still looking. “If you do, send them before you publish,” she said. I asked whether she wanted to identify the people in them. “Yes.” Then she added, “Don’t put the names underneath. Let me tell you first.”