The Penitent

by Isaac Bashevis Singer

  Such was my mood that morning when I went down to the restaurant for breakfast. I bought a newspaper, and as I turned the pages I found everything there that I wanted to escape from: wars, glorification of revolution, murders, rapes, politicians’ cynical promises, lying editorials, acclaim of stupid books, dirty plays and films. The paper paid tribute to every possible kind of idolatry and spat at truth. According to the editors, if the voters would only choose the President they recommended, and put into effect this or the other reform, all would be right with the world. Even the obituary page was made to seem somehow optimistic. It listed all the accomplishments of those who died, and displayed their photographs. A theatrical producer had died and the account enumerated all the trashy plays he had produced, all the smut he had presented on stage. The fact that he had died relatively young was glossed over. The emphasis was on the fact that he had accumulated a big estate, which he left to his fourth or fifth wife.

  That day a murderer was arrested, one who had been charged with the same crime several times before but each time had been freed on bail or paroled. His photograph was printed, too, along with the name of his lawyer, whose function it was to teach this murderer how to avoid punishment so that he could kill more innocent people.

  Yes, there was much to escape from and to reject. But escape to where? There was religious news in the paper too. It told of two Christian organizations that were merging like two firms on Wall Street, and of some rabbi who was getting a medal. He stood there among ladies who smiled sweetly at him for the camera while he smiled back and displayed the medal. He looked vulgar, and although supposedly a Jew, he had the most Gentile name that an assimilated Jew could pick out.

  But what would my religion be? What could I believe in? …

  The waitress came and I ordered breakfast. I watched someone at the next table working away at his plate of ham with eggs. I had long since come to the conclusion that man’s treatment of God’s creatures makes mockery of all his ideals and of the whole alleged humanism. In order for this overstuffed individual to enjoy his ham, a living creature had to be raised, dragged to its death, stabbed, tortured, scalded in hot water. The man didn’t give a second’s thought to the fact that the pig was made of the same stuff as he and that it had to pay with suffering and death so that he could taste its flesh. I’ve thought more than once that when it comes to animals, every man is a Nazi. I had pondered this often, but somehow I had never come to any resolution. I myself bought a fur coat for Liza made from the skins of dozens of creatures. With what rapture and enthusiasm she stroked the fur of those butchered animals. How she poured out praises for skins torn from the bodies of others!

  Yes, I had always felt these things, but that morning they literally hit me on the head like a hammer. That morning I realized for the first time what a horrible hypocrite I was.

  4

  The first decision I made had no direct bearing on religion, but to me it represented a religious decision. To wit: to eat no more meat or fish, nothing that had ever lived and been killed for food. Even when I was a businessman who wanted to become rich, even as I deceived others and myself, too, I knew that I was living against my convictions and that my way of life was false and corrupt. I was myself a liar, but I hated lies and deceit of every kind. I was a lecher, but I felt a revulsion against loose women and against wantonness in general. I ate meat, but a shudder ran through me each time I reminded myself how meat becomes meat. I’ve studied enough to know that the Torah regards the eating of flesh as a “necessary evil.” The Torah speaks with contempt of those who yearn for the fleshpots of meat. I had always felt the greatest sympathy for those groups in India who practice vegetarianism as part of their religion. Everything that had to do with slaughtering, skinning, and hunting always evoked disgust within me and guilt feelings that words cannot describe. I sometimes thought that even if a voice from Heaven decreed the slaughter of animals and the shedding of their blood to be a virtue, I would respond like that Tanna who said, “We don’t care about voices from Heaven.” As you can see, I’ve turned back to Jewishness, but even among the pious I live with, I’ve remained a kind of misfit. They often reproach me, “You needn’t be more saintly than the saints. You must not pity creatures more than the Almighty does.” Some reprove me for not eating meat or fish on the Sabbath. But I always tell them, “If I’m fated to end up in Gehenna for not eating meat, I take this punishment upon myself gladly. I am absolutely convinced that so long as people shed the blood of God’s creatures, there’ll be no peace on earth. It’s one step from spilling animal blood to spilling human blood.” For me, thou shalt not kill includes animals, too. I managed to persuade my present wife to my way of thinking. We are a family of vegetarians.

  It would take too long to describe to you everything that I went through since the day I lost my wife, my mistress, and my business. One minute I was bound to mundane society with a thousand threads, or chains, and the next I was cut off from everything and everybody. The first thing I did that morning was to turn everything I had into traveler’s checks. The bank tellers wondered why I was buying them in such large amounts. They asked where I was headed and I told them I was going on a round-the-world trip, with stops in many countries. They all said the same thing—that they envied me. One girl asked me if my wife was going along, and I told her I was a widower. In a sense, this wasn’t a lie. I felt that my whole world had died.

  I constantly told myself that only one way out remained for me: to return to Jewishness, and not merely to some modern arbitrary Jewishness, but to the Jewishness of my grandfathers and great-grandfathers. But there arose the question of all questions: Did I also possess their faith? And I answered myself clearly and sincerely, No, I did not possess their faith. “In that case, what sense does it make to return to the Jewishness of your grandfathers?” a voice within me asked. “You won’t be a real Jew, you’ll merely be playing the part. You’ll be like those actors who put on prayer shawls and portray saints and rabbis on stage, then go home and revert to their rotten ways.” The same voice went on: “Don’t make a fool of yourself and ruin your life. You’re an unbeliever like all other unbelievers, and you must live their life. If your wife has been unfaithful to you, find one that will be true or get a mistress who will suit your needs. To throw yourself into Jewishness without believing that every word in the Shulhan Arukh is sacred is what is called in Yiddish laying a healthy head on a sick pillow. You’ll be something neither here nor there, a paradox, a hypocrite.”

  But another voice interjected: “All other ways except extreme Jewishness must lead to the lies and lewdness you despise. If you don’t believe in the Shulhan Arukh, then you must believe in evil and in all kinds of empty and bankrupt theories that lead to the abyss. When a man is drowning and sees a life preserver, he doesn’t ask who threw it, how long it might last, or other such questions. A drowning man even clutches at a straw. You saw with your own eyes what licentiousness leads to: The KGB, the Gestapo. If you don’t want to be a Nazi, you must become the opposite. It’s no accident that Hitler and his theoreticians waged such a savage war against the Talmud Jude. These villains rightfully sensed that the Talmud and the Talmud Jew were their greatest enemy. A Jew without God can easily be persuaded that Lenin, Trotsky, or Stalin will bring deliverance. Jews without God can believe that Karl Marx was the Messiah. Jews without faith not only clutch at straws but even at burned straws. Every few months they find a new idol, a new illusion, a new vogue, a new madness. They revere all kinds of murderers, whores, false prophets, clowns. They go wild over every little scribbler, every ham actor, every harlot. Even if Moses’ Torah and the Talmud are nothing more than the works of men, they are still the mightiest barrier against wickedness. The Talmud Jew doesn’t kill. He doesn’t take part in wild orgies. You don’t have to fear him in the woods or on a lonely road. He doesn’t carry a gun. He doesn’t scheme to come to your house when you are away and sleep with your wife. He has no wish to dishonor your daughter. Althoug
h he didn’t adopt Christianity, he’s been turning his other cheek for two thousand years, while those who profess Christian love often plucked out his beard, along with a piece of the cheek. This Talmud Jew doesn’t deal violently with any race, class, or group. All he wants is to earn a living and raise his children and children’s children to follow in the ways of the Torah and the Shulhan Arukh. He wants to raise chaste daughters instead of whores. He doesn’t need modern literature, theater, nude art. He doesn’t change his outlook every Monday and Thursday.

  “It’s true that not all Talmud Jews are saints. There are degrees among them, too. There are those who act unethically, chase after honors, and become involved in all kinds of Hasidic cliques and quarrels. But even the worst among them don’t murder, don’t hunt, don’t rape, don’t justify killing, don’t scheme to liquidate whole classes and races, don’t transform family life into a joke. Besides, why take an example from the worst rather than from the best? There is trash everywhere. Actually, if a man is a swindler, he’s not a Jew anymore.”

  That’s what the other voice said, and this was a mighty voice and I knew that morning that it would never be silenced again. In a moment, it cried out to me: “If one idolatry demands blood and shame and the other idolatry demands compassion and purity, then serve the latter.”

  I recalled those Jewish Communists who called Chmielnitzky a liberator of the masses. I also thought of the Jewish revolutionaries in the second half of the nineteenth century who justified the pogroms in Russia as an expression of the people’s rebellion against the tsar. And what about the praises that their counterparts in our generation sang to Stalin, knowing he had murdered and tortured millions of innocent people, including hundreds of thousands of Jews, and all in the name of the holy revolution, which is the Baal and the Moloch of many modern Jews? There wasn’t an evil these Red Jews wouldn’t justify if they felt it greased the wheels of what they called progress.

  “What concrete steps can I take now?” I asked the voice, and it replied: “Go to a house of prayer and pray.”

  “Without faith?” I countered, and the voice said: “You have more faith than you know.”

  I knew of no synagogues or houses of prayer in the neighborhood in which I now found myself. I had no prayer shawl or phylacteries. The whole idea of praying seemed wild to me, but the voice wouldn’t let up. It offered me practical advice: “Take a cab downtown to East Broadway and the streets thereabouts. There you will find what you are seeking. If you want to be a Jew, you must begin right now.”

  I hailed a cab and told the driver to take me to the Lower East Side. I sat in the cab astounded and ashamed at what was happening to me. The other voice mocked me: “So you’re becoming pious because a couple of females gave you horns? Your piety is a lie and a self-deception. This God to whom you’re going to pray doesn’t exist. Where was He when the Jews of Poland dug their own graves? Where was He when the Nazis played with the skulls of Jewish children? If He does exist and He kept silent, He is as much a murderer as Hitler.”

  With such thoughts and feelings I arrived where I had asked to be driven. For many minutes I walked around without finding a house of prayer. I came to a small synagogue but they had finished praying and the doors were locked. I was already planning to put off my newly awakened Jewishness till tomorrow. The Almighty had waited so long, the scoffer within me noted, He would wait another day. Suddenly something happened which at that moment I considered a miracle. A Jew with a gray beard stopped me and said, “Maybe you’d like to join a minyan? Come inside. We need one more.” And the man mentioned the name of some rabbi who was waiting for a tenth Jew.

  I stood there dumbfounded.

  “I was actually looking for a house of prayer,” I said.

  “Come along, then.”

  “But I don’t have a prayer shawl or phylacteries.”

  “We’ll give you a prayer shawl and phylacteries.”

  I believed then and I still do that this was no coincidence. The powers that watch over every human being, every insect and worm, had directed me onto the path I was destined to tread and which I chose after many tribulations. I let myself be escorted by the man. We came to an old building and walked up a stoop to the apartment where they were waiting for me.

  5

  The house where the rabbi lived was of the type condemned to be razed. I entered a narrow, dark hallway. The door opened and I came into a kind of American Hasidic study house that contained a holy ark, shelves of old books, a lectern, and benches. I might have been back in Warsaw, but the few men who were pacing around here wore not the cloth caps of Warsaw but crushed and spotted fedoras. They looked old, wrinkled, neglected. Their faces showed no trace of the fervor you’d find in a Warsaw Hasidic shtibl.

  They gazed at me with bewilderment. Apparently I didn’t look like the kind of man who would let himself be dragged to a minyan in the middle of the day.

  One of them said, “I’ll get the rabbi.”

  He vanished for a time, then came back with an old man with a white beard and a skullcap. He wore a faded coat that was unbuttoned to show a large ritual garment with fringes hanging nearly to the ankles. The rabbi was the size of a six-year-old boy. He had a sickly, swollen abdomen. His complexion was yellowish. I’m no doctor, but when I looked at him I knew that he was deathly ill. He didn’t walk but shuffled his feet. His eyes reflected a softness I had already forgotten in America. This was a person who couldn’t hurt a fly. I realized that his swelling came from illness, not overeating. I greeted him and his voice was as mild as his gaze.

  He extended a soft hand to me and asked, “Where are you from?”

  “I’m from Poland, but I’ve been in America for several years.”

  “Where were you during the Holocaust?”

  I told him and found out that he had been in Maidenek. This was the first time I had met a pious Jew who had been saved from the Nazi villains. I asked him which rabbinical court he came from and he named one that wasn’t familiar to me.

  In a short while, we gathered to pray. I had grown accustomed to the rapid pace at which Americans do everything, but here they moved along with unusual slowness. It took a good half hour for the old man to put on his prayer shawl and phylacteries. I looked at his old prayer shawl and I knew that soon it and the old body under it would be lying in the grave. Someone had already told me that the rabbi suffered from bad kidneys and that he retained water. I watched as he wound the thongs around his arm and mumbled. How such a body could survive Maidenek, I’ll never understand.

  I stood gazing at a martyr, one of those saints who are supposed to carry the world on their shoulders. With what fervor he recited the blessings! He had to strain to put on the phylacteries, even to kiss the fringes. I could see that each move meant agony. The soul just barely reposed in this saintly body. I couldn’t bring myself to believe that I had been so privileged as to see this remnant of old Jewishness with my own eyes. One of the men suggested that the rabbi sit down for the Eighteen Benedictions, but he wouldn’t hear of it.

  I saw how he slowly raised a trembling hand and smote his breast as he uttered: “We have sinned” and “We have transgressed.” He, the saint, repented his uncommitted sins while millions of evildoers boasted of murder and tens of thousands of lawyers—Jews among them—sought means of freeing every thief, robber, swindler, and rapist. I was seized by a sense of self-shame. There were saints in New York but I had spent my time with whores, with sly exploiters, with manufacturers who dallied with call girls. Now I had a prayer shawl and phylacteries that someone had lent me but I had forgotten how to wind the thongs so that they formed the letter shin of the word shaddai—God.

  I prayed and saw to my amazement that this was far from comedy and sham. I thanked the Creator for directing me to this room among true Jews, who still sought a minyan while the outside world swarmed with hate and evil theories. Here, old age was no disgrace. Here, no one boasted of his sexual prowess or his ability to hold liquor. Here, the e
lderly were treated with respect and pious humility. No one here dyed his hair, claimed to be “eighty years young,” or used the other banalities heard among the worldly aged.

  Up to that day I had been a reader of books, magazines, and newspapers. I had often felt that what I was reading was a deadly poison. All it evoked within me was bitterness, fear, and a feeling of helplessness. Everything that I read followed the same theme—the world was and will always be ruled by might and falsehood, and there was nothing to be done about it. Modern literature used different words to say the same thing: “We live in a slaughterhouse and a house of shame. That’s how it was and that’s how it’s going to be forever.” Suddenly I heard myself reciting words filled with holy optimism. Instead of starting the day with tales of theft and murder, lust and rape, obscenity and revenge, I had started the day with words about justice, sanctity, a God who had granted men understanding and who will revive the dead and reward the just. I had discovered that I didn’t have to start the day by swallowing venom.

  After praying, I did something which may appear to you melodramatic, but I’m not a literary man and I don’t care whether I am dramatic or melodramatic. I announced to one and all: “I have money and whoever needs help can get it from me.” I assumed that a commotion would erupt around me; that hands would stretch out and everyone would shout: “Give! Give!” as I was conditioned to expect among today’s people who, no matter how much they took from you, were never satisfied. But these Jews only looked at me bewildered, and smiled as if I was playing a role for them. Only two of them told me that they were in need. I had a walletful of cash and I gave them as much as they needed. They seemed embarrassed, hesitated, and explained the reasons for their requests. The others said that they didn’t need anything, but they all agreed that the truly needy one was the rabbi.