The Old Religion

by David Mamet

  “Oh, Lord, I’m tired,” he thought.

  The Rabbi

  “There seem to be two courses,” he said, “though they both may be one. But I do not think they are.”

  “Go on,” the Rabbi said.

  “The first is to do these things to better ourselves; or to become … I don’t know how to say it, but the end, I think, is to become … the words I might use are ‘fuller,’ or ‘wiser,’ or ‘more happy’—I think that those are the words—through the things that we do.

  “The second, for want of a better word, is ‘to serve God.’” He looked at the other man. “What do you think of that?”

  “There are many ways to serve God,” the Rabbi said.

  Frank’s face fell.

  That night he thought about the Rabbi.

  “Well, what was he but a man? An overworked man, out of goodness or, perhaps, if he was paid for it, out of necessity—but lump them together under one head and say, ‘from a sense of duty’—working as a prison chaplain.

  “A tired man, of necessarily stock responses. He was sent not to ‘share my enlightenment’ but to enlighten me—which, in fact, he does. Through his unconcern. It is not to him, but to me, to reason,” he thought. “Why should he care for me at all?

  “He, I am sure, in fact, has prejudice against a man he cannot but think guilty. Ah.” He nodded.

  “Guilty and ‘Bad for the Jews.’ What could be worse for the Jews than I? What could be worse?

  “And perhaps, to suffer in silence is to Sanctify the Name.

  “What trash runs through my head,” he thought. “What nonsense.

  “What effort there is in weaning oneself from the world. We can succeed for one second, then we are drawn back into it. Briefly, briefly, free of regret. Free of our anger. For a moment. And then drawn back into it. All those beasts …”

  He thought he saw pictured before him the courtroom, and the faces of the reporters, transfixed in perfect completion. Perfect in their happiness, in their submission in the Tribe—as Levites assisting the sacrifice.

  “You swine,” he thought. “You Christians.”

  A skill

  The process of learning a foreign language seemed to him the paradigm of human endeavor.

  One struggled in the darkness; and mastery came—when it came—in increments so small as to be recognizable only in retrospect.

  And accomplishment carried no particular joy, only a feeling of irritability. As, he thought, of course the word for “eternally” in Hebrew was tamid.

  “Further,” he thought, “to whom could I boast of my mastery of Hebrew? The Jews would take the ability as a matter of course, and no one else would care.”

  In learning, one said, “I will know it in the future.” But that particular future never arrived, for the term—in its use here—meant “the present.”

  “Not a time to come,” he thought, “but a magical, simultaneous present. Like this time in all respects save that in it I will speak the foreign tongue.

  “For who would pine for a time to come which was remarkable only for the fact that time had passed, in which passing time one had suffered to master a skill?

  “No,” he thought, “the future is simple idolatry. And, similarly, ‘Change,’ and ‘tomorrow.’

  “Equally the past. For that is how they’ve condemned me—in the search for a magical past, like the present in all respects but with no Jews.

  “They long for some magical past when there was no strife; and point and say, ‘If he were gone, this past would reappear.’

  “So this past is, again, the future—for even if one could return to it, when would one do so but in a subsequent moment? So, it is the Magic Future, free of strife, in which the Goyim will be freed from their historic impediment, and in which, equally, I will have mastered Hebrew, and the seven forms of the Hebrew verb.

  “Well, then,” he thought, “how can that future exist in which, at once, I have mastered Hebrew and there are no more Jews?

  “Clearly no one future can exist, for all are, to a certain extent, at least potentially contradictory; or, say, ‘mutually excluding’; and so, it is not the future at all which one seeks, but (in a supportive proof) idolatry, and, so, it is proved.

  “Which does not help me with the following verb: shin hay mem, to guard. Shamoor, guarded. Shomer, guarding. Nismor, guarding, or protecting, oneself.

  “How peaceful it is here,” he thought.

  The Hebrew language

  The Rabbi took a packet of tobacco from the pocket of his shirt and began rolling a smoke. He offered his hands toward Frank, who nodded, his thoughts far away.

  He finished rolling the one and then the second cigarette. He handed both across toward Frank, who took one.

  The Rabbi took a kitchen match from the same pocket of his shirt and struck it on the side rail of the iron cot. The smell of sulfur filled the room.

  “Why does it make the heat less?” Frank said. He looked at his cigarette.

  “Does it? I think it does. …”

  “’F you thought of it …?”

  “I think …,” the Rabbi said, “that it distracts us. …”

  The men sat there smoking for a moment. Then the Rabbi raised his eyebrows to say, “Well? Shall we continue?” Frank nodded, and they bent over the books, spread open on the cot.

  “Zachor,” he said. “To remember. Lecket, to glean. Shamar, to guard. Nagah, to touch.”

  He continued. The Rabbi leaned back in his chair, to take his body out of the sun. There was some cool in the wall of the cell, and a small triangle of shade between the wall and the bars.

  “Ahav, to love. Shatah, to drink. Hain, favor, or grace. Maskoret, reward. Azav, to leave. Amrim, sheaves. Poal …”

  Frank’s thought went back to the trial, as always. Not his arrest, or the assault that day on the streets, not his incarceration, but the trial.

  “Was I naive?” he thought, as part of his mind thought most of the day, every day; and, “Was ever anyone so naive?” He rebelled at the presence of the other man in his cell, as if, now, as his thoughts recurred to the trial, the other man were witnessing his degradation.

  He looked at the shadow on the floor. The window bars, across the joint in the flooring, told an angle of thirty degrees, or two o’clock. In half an hour the Rabbi would leave. But how, he wondered, could he get through the half hour?

  “Yes …?” the other man said.

  Now the cigarette was hot, burnt to his fingers, and the smoke was hot in his lungs. He took the coffee can and pushed the butt into the sand in it and held it toward the other man, who shook his head and then inclined it toward the book, to say, “Let us continue.”

  Frank was overcome, at that moment, by his hatred of the Rabbi—by furious, overwhelming hatred for him and for all that he represented.

  “No,” he thought. “No. Wait. No. Wait. What am I going to do now? Kill him? What? Kill? Measly little Jew. Sour sweat. What is he, sweating into his cheap suit?

  “Why doesn’t he take his coat off?”

  The Rabbi was speaking.

  “What?” Frank said. “What …?”

  “Moledet,” the man said.

  “What …?”

  “Moledet.”

  “Birth. Birth.” Frank said. “Birth. Kindred.”

  Shalat

  There was no talk of a pardon, he was told. It was enough, he was told, that the governor had commuted his sentence to life in prison. That man would never again, he was told, hold elective office in the state; and was, in fact, he was told, in danger. He had received threats. He …

  Frank dozed somewhat, as his lawyer went on. he heard the references to “years to come” and “eventually”; and he drifted off, and, in his mind, this haze mingled with his sleep in his cell; and the lawyer seemed, in his dream, to be using a Latin term, and that term was “salt.”

  “Assault?” he wondered. “Soult? Saut?” The root was familiar, but he could not apply it to the pre
sent case of his incarceration.

  “And why should he speak in foreign tongues?” he thought. “What is the purpose of it but to obscure?”

  But perhaps it was Hebrew, he thought, in his dream. The Leshon HaKodesh. The Holy tongue. “Salt.” He reduced it to Shin Lamed Tof. “What can this root mean?” He dreamed, in his dream, he was in a stone building in some Eastern port city. He was dressed in a toga and carried a roll of papyrus, or what he took papyrus to be, as he walked into the building which he then knew was a library. But there were women there, which struck him as odd, as he knew that women, in the city in which he found himself, in ancient Greece, in Rome, perhaps, would not have been allowed into the building.

  “Not women,” he thought. “That was not the operative prohibition. It was Jews. Jews would not have been allowed. I would not have been allowed. …”

  During the day, he thought back on the dream. He progressed. From “What was I seeking?” to “some word,” to “some legal term,” to “sue”; and, thus, to the memory of his encounter with the lawyer the afternoon before, and, thus, to its reiteration in that evening’s dream, and, unbidden, later, to the word “salt.”

  But was it Hebrew? he thought.

  When his work in the dispensary was finished, he returned to his cell for prayers. And, after prayers he took down the lexicon, and a pad and pencil.

  “Shin. Lamed. Tof,” he wrote out. “Or, Shin. Lamed. Tet; or, Samech Lamed Tet or Tof” he wrote. “Or …” Here he looked at the list and perceived these would be enough for his beginning.

  Under the first he found nothing. Under the second, “Shalat. Shin. Lamed. Tof: to domineer. From the Aramaic: to overcome, to prevail.”

  Could that be it? But, no—as it solidified, and became not an unexplained experience but a landmark, and that landmark only the one meaning, and that meaning unconnected to his dream, he discarded it. It was devoid of mystery. That mystery was the word “salt,” which he had dreamed, and which was being brought back to him to remind him, to admonish him. But of what?

  And, suddenly, he was back in his kitchen. On that Saturday morning. Over his breakfast. Sitting alone. Early. Ruthie out shopping, as she did Saturdays, his wife asleep upstairs, and he was in his kitchen, cooking porridge. He was reading the newspaper. His hand went out for the salt, and the glass jar knocked over, the cork fell out, and the salt sprinkled over the counter.

  “That,” he thought, “was my first premonition. If I had one. As I look back to it: that was it.” And then he thought, “There is no augury in Israel, No sorcery in Judah,” and, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” and, “… no signs or portents.”

  But surely the Torah contradicted itself on this point, as it did on most every point, giving alternate or conflicting advice or commandment.

  Were there not, he thought, Medad and Eldad, whom Moses himself allowed to prophesy? And was there not …

  “No,” he thought. “This is new to me, and I should not be allowed to confute even myself in this ancient argument. …”

  (“Nadah and Abihu,” a descant ran in his mind.)

  “… and Baalam,” he thought. “Whose prophecies were directed by the Lord. And … and the Prophets themselves,” he thought. “Ezekiel, Elijah himself; and, further …

  “I must ask the Rabbi” and “The man knows nothing” warred in his head. From the short conflict emerged: “What can you expect of a prison system so poor, so savage; and from a man who himself …” The conflict reemerged with: “No, I will not think ill of the Rabbi, who, whatever his incompetencies, has worked to help me.

  “The salt was spirit,” he thought. The feeling grew as it came back to him. “… and I thought, ‘scrape it up and throw it over your shoulder.’ and then I thought, ‘that’s superstition, and unfitting to a man who can understand the workings of cause and effect.’ And then I thought …”

  He remembered how he prided himself on his logical process: “I am a careful man, and am I to fly in the face of ancient custom (which would not exist without a reason) without first examining it? For my desire to perform magic with the salt is strong.”

  And he remembered hearing his wife stirring upstairs, at that early, unaccustomed time, and hoping she would not come down to spoil his cherished Saturday morning privacy.

  “Why might it exist?” he thought. “That superstition? And could it, in any way, affect the progress of …” Here he remembered the boy riding past on the bicycle, and here, too, that the day was the Confederate Memorial Day; and that he might have difficulty with the crowds on his way home from work.

  He had swept the salt with the fat side of his hand, toward the counter edge. It formed small, diagonal ridges in the moist day, adhering to the wood; but he swept it along, over the edge, and into his other palm, as he debated.

  He wondered how he would act next—puzzled that he could divide himself in two: the actor and the observer at once; and the actor again into two: he who would throw and he would not throw the offering; and then it came to him, and he raised his left hand, and held it over the porridge pot, and threw the salt into it.

  “I have not wasted it,” he thought. “It has meaning.”

  But what was that word?

  He glanced down at the pad and saw, written there, Shalat. He tried to remember its meaning, and found it was gone.

  “No, it must be there,” he thought. “For it was there a moment ago. Shin. Lamed. Tof. Shalat: to …” “Yes?” an opposing voice asked. “Yes,” he thought. “To overcome. From the Aramaic.”

  A different religion

  There was something in it. However he tried.

  There was something in it … just beyond him; he knew what it was when he did not confront it intellectually.

  When he looked away, as it were, there it was. It was a warm and correct feeling of belonging. “That is it,” he thought. “It feels ‘correct.’”

  It was a “clean” word, he thought.

  But when he confronted it beyond the issue of faith, there was little he could see.

  When he confronted it, he saw that they did not want him and despised his efforts to belong. He saw that, to them, he would always be a Jew. And that all his ratiocination regarding assimilation was, to them, pathetic. More, that there was but a short step between their sad bemusement at his antics and their rage. But beyond that, he felt, there was something in it that he—not “as a Jew,” certainly no, but “as a man”—was entitled to. Something that They had.

  That something was his right as an American. That was his right as a citizen of a country which guaranteed religious freedom.

  What was that freedom, if not the Freedom to Choose?

  Oh, but the smallest movement could have meaning. Not only the larger signs, oh, no, the smaller signs too—and, perhaps, more so.

  “There is a different religion,” the Rabbi said. “It is no more complex than that.

  “Medad and Eldad,” said the Rabbi. “Yes. Nadab and Abihu.

  “The question of prophecy. Where were we?”

  Americus

  What was “the Country”? Frank thought. There was no country. There was but a loose association of common interests cloaked, for convenience, in the mantle of a civil religion.

  This religion was the highest authority, to transgress against which was death.

  That was, he reflected, a democracy. This was democracy: the rule of the Mob. The Mob had elected itself God, and worshiped itself under another name. That name was America. “But,” the Rabbi said, “the dove had been dispatched the three times. Once, it had returned. The second time, it returned with the branch in its mouth, and the third time, it had not returned at all.

  “Could it not be,” Frank reflected, “that the dove had wanted to remain on the ark? That when Noah expelled it, it returned hurt, hurt and fearful; that when he sent it out again, it returned with this evidence: the land exists, but it is bitter.

  “Here, I bring the representative fruit.

  �
�Then, when Noah repulsed it again, it went forth, having been given no choice but to make its way in that bitter world.”

  “Marah,” the Rabbi said, “is ‘bitter.’ It survived in Latin and the Romance tongues as amer, which we see further elaborated but essentially unchanged in the map-maker’s name Americus and in the land America.”

  “Vast ships upon the sea,” Frank thought, “brought starved men, clothed in armor, to the wonder of the brown-skinned natives.”

  “And the well of Miriam,” the Rabbi said, “followed the Israelites throughout the decades in the desert. ‘Miriam’ is also from marah. And also the well is meribah.”

  “The ark,” Frank thought, “thus becoming also the Garden of Eden. From which they did not wish to be expelled.”

  “… and in the modern ‘Mary,’” the Rabbi said.

  “For the land,” Frank thought, “the land is bitter.”

  Visiting day

  He turned the ring on his finger as he waited for his wife.

  “Yes,” he thought, “I know I am doing it.”

  He remarked the prison smells, and tried to sense them as she might: repugnant, fetid, revolting, the sewage smell—that nameless poverty and despair and sewerage and sweat which was in the wood, which so revolted him at first.

  “That was the worst trial,” he thought. The clothes imperfectly cleaned and, then, ironed, the stink burned into them.

  That smell. The stench of shit on everything.

  “Is it an actionable luxury to be clean,” he thought, “and should the clean atone for their mindless enjoyment of magnificence? What must she think, to come here smelling of soap, her very dress clean?

  “In the desert, the air was dry. Smells did not carry. Everyone was washed in sweat. Everyone’s diet and life was the same, so odors, when they came, went unremarked; or, if remarked, were not improbably recognized as the smell of home.

  “Not unlike the furniture polish on the hall hatrack; for a nomadic people have only each other. That is their home.”