by Howard Fast
“Yet it could give you strength and courage at a time when you might need it.”
“Orthodoxy or faith?” Martin wondered. “The two are not the same thing.”
“But your forebears, Martin,” Ed Frome said, “the worthy Pilgrim fathers, were the most orthodox of the orthodox. They may have been a cold and bleak parcel of folk, but they cut their homes out of this wilderness and they survived and they really put their stamp on this place.”
“True, and I can’t help thinking of the Orthodox Jews who went to their death in the Holocaust with such courage and faith.”
“Your own vision, Martin,” Ed Frome said. “I’ll be damned if I’d vouch for or even try to approximate the feelings of the people who were slaughtered by Hitler. And I’m not defending orthodoxy, and I’m not even sure that I don’t dislike your Pilgrim fathers intensely. They’re definitely not my crowd. But I will say this — that the handful of Jews who fought the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto for over forty days — they were not Orthodox.”
“I suppose Catholics are the most orthodox of all,” Millie said.
“I did a hitch in Salt Lake City for the U.S.O.,” Lucy said. “You can’t even spell orthodoxy until you’ve been around the Mormons.”
“Or a Southern Baptist,” Martin said. “They’re all very sure that they have God’s word and purpose down letter-perfect. All the orthodox share that conviction, and in the name of this crazy, malignant, bloodthirsty God, whether Episcopal, Lutheran, or Catholic or Muslim — whatever religion you choose — they will kill and slaughter by the millions.”
“Good heavens,” Della said, “is that the kind of sermon you preach?”
“That’s the kind of sermon he thinks,” Millie said. “It isn’t easy to be a minister and know what hell religion has produced.”
“Into the living room, please, for our coffee,” Lucy told them. “This conversation is getting dangerous.”
Mrs. Holtzman lived with her daughter and her son-in-law in Danbury. Usually, her daughter picked her up, but tonight both of them were in New York at theater. Lucy suggested that they make up a bed on their couch, but David said, no, he’d drive her home. When Lucy protested that it was over an hour’s drive round trip, David told her that he could use the time to clear his head.
For the first few minutes, sitting beside David in the car, Mrs. Holtzman remained silent. Then she said, uncertainly, “Would it be all right for me to ask you a question, Rabbi?”
“Of course.”
But like most people who at last find their important point of reference, Mrs. Holtzman’s question was preceded by a lengthy explanation. She herself was the daughter of a lower-middle-class Jewish family in Frankfurt. They had owned a notions shop and also sold some specialized fabrics, cheesecloth and netting and stiffening and inexpensive lace. It was a small business that provided no luxuries. They were a deeply religious family. “We suffered,” Mrs. Holtzman said, counting on her fingers, “Mama, Papa, my brother Hans, my sister Esther — all of them dead, murdered by the Nazis. I survived Dachau. Why? I don’t know why, Rabbi. God decided. I must not question God’s decisions. At night I pray. God of my fathers, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, I mourn the dead and I do not understand your favoring me, but I thank you. But my son-in-law, he has a different point of view. He won’t set foot in a synagogue. His son will not be a Bar Mitzvah. I can’t repeat the words he says about God, the names he calls him, and he says it doesn’t matter, because he says there is no God. He says that even a stupid, sick God would not create such creatures as Hitler and Stalin. So I have to ask you, Rabbi, and I don’t like to because it shows how weak my faith is, but still I must ask you.”
She couldn’t frame the question, he realized. She could no more say to him, Is my God a sick, demented, malignant son of a bitch? than she could take off her clothes and dance naked in the moonlight.
“Well, you know,” David said, “if you read the Bible, you will read of men almost as evil and destructive as Hitler and Stalin.”
“You believe that, Rabbi — just as evil?”
“Oh, yes. Yes, indeed. And in history but apart from the Bible, men like Genghis Khan — yes, even such a man as Napoleon.”
“But Napoleon was a great man!”
“Well, perhaps it’s how you look at these things. I feel that God has his own point of view,” thinking, And if she says to me, “Is there a God?” What am I to answer?
“And you think God has a purpose in all these terrible things, a purpose we don’t understand?”
He had to force the words: “I think, perhaps, that God arranged it so that men work out their own destiny.”
“And he, the Lord of the universe, watched the gas chambers and stood by? And he watched what happened in the Warsaw Ghetto and just shrugged it off? But why does it say in the Bible that in the battles, he helped the Jews? He made the sun stand still. He made the walls of Jericho fall down. He destroyed a whole Assyrian army that had invaded the land of Israel.”
“Yes, well, that was another time.”
He was lying. He was sitting next to a poor, stout, uneducated middle-aged woman who had been through all the fires of hell, and who pleaded with him to explain the vagaries of the God she worshipped. After all, that was his function; that was surely one of the reasons why he had become a rabbi, to explain all the bewildering and monstrous behavior of God; and now, he knew, he was expected to explain to Mrs. Holtzman that God gave man free will, and free will included Hitler and all the others — monsters that peopled the pages of history.
“Rabbi —” she said plaintively.
“Yes, Mrs. Holtzman?”
“I shouldn’t ask you such questions. I know that I shouldn’t ask you such questions.”
He brought her to where she lived with her daughter and her son-in-law, and then he drove home, slowly. There were tears in his eyes. A great surge of emotion had produced the tears. And the emotion was the result of the simple questions Mrs. Holtzman had asked.
Lucy was in bed, waiting for him, and she said, “You do know, David, that without Mrs. Holtzman I would be absolutely wiped out. That lady is a treasure. I thought the night went well. Real nifty, high-class conversation.” She had Graham Greene’s book The Quiet American on her lap. “This is dynamite. Your friend Eddie Frome brought it tonight. Is something wrong?”
He shook his head, and Lucy studied him, seeing him consciously for the first time that evening. “You look so sad.”
“Yes, I suppose I do.” He began to take his clothes off.
“David, something did happen.”
He went into the bathroom. Lucy heard the water running, the sound of his tooth-brushing. All the motions we go through, she thought. All the senseless motions.
The toilet flushed. Through all the misery that she had sensed in her husband, still he washed his hands, brushed his teeth, and flushed the toilet. She remembered a story by Sinclair Lewis, in which a Middle Western farmer, rebelling against the structure of his whole life, refused to brush his teeth. She tried to think of something appropriate to say to David as he opened the door of the bathroom, but nothing she could think of fitted the moment. David, in his pajamas, sat down on the edge of the bed.
“Want to talk about it?” Lucy asked him.
“What can I talk about, Lucy? I’m a rabbi who has lost his belief in God.”
“You feel that? I mean, when did it happen? Can something like that happen, just all of a sudden?”
“It’s been adding up, one thing and another. Then that talk about shared premises. My own premise was a fraud. I’ve always counted myself a person of reason and intelligence, and all the horror and cruelty and duplicity I have seen, I’ve always explained with the handy proposition that God gives man free will. Tonight it didn’t work. I drove that poor woman home, and she asked me about God, and all my thoughts and beliefs and devotions turned into a miserable and shameful farce.”
“You’ve never done a shameful thing in your life!
” Lucy protested.
“Endless numbers, Lucy.” He got up and began to pace the room. “Standing at that pit of horror at Dachau with a full stomach, a well-dressed, well-fed American officer, top of the world, what fine liberators we are when we’re not atomizing Japanese cities, and then ten years here in this safe little nest of white Protestant middle-class comfort, where they don’t murder Jews and are mostly quite nice to them —”
“David,” Lucy cried, “what the devil are you doing?”
“Oh, my God,” he whispered, dropping down on the bed again. “I’m not talking sense, am I?”
“Not very much, no.”
“I’m frightened.”
“Of what, David? Of what?”
“I was never frightened this way,” he said slowly, holding out one trembling hand. “The world disintegrates,” staring at his hand. “No God and no hope — hairless apes who kill and kill and kill.”
“You married an atheist,” Lucy said firmly. “I work, I live, I have carried two children, and they’re pretty good kids too. I cook and sew and take care of all of you, and I do it without any God kicking my ass around.”
“I never believed that,” David said desperately. “I always thought it was a piece of bravado on your part. You must believe in something, or you’d feel the way I feel now.”
He was pleading with her, and now she gave in and said, “Yes, something. I don’t know what it is or if it’s inside me or outside me. But I don’t believe in the kind of God you and Martin push, and neither does Millie, if you want the plain, honest truth.”
“Are you telling me that Millie Carter is an atheist?”
“No, that is a dumb word, David. Millie and I have talked a good deal about this. We don’t know what we believe in, but not the ridiculous God you and Martin push. God as a man heaven help us! Can you watch a woman give birth and believe — if you’re going to have an anthropomorphic God that it’s a man and not a woman? But that’s crazy, isn’t it? Do you know why nobody talks about God? Because the moment you start, you descend to the realm of idiocy.”
“I never thought of God as an old man with a white beard, sitting up in the clouds.”
“How did you think of God?”
“I don’t know.”
“David, David, my dear, nothing has changed from yesterday. It’s almost two o’clock in the morning, and in a few hours I’ll have to put up the oatmeal and fry the eggs and do the rest of it. Let’s go to sleep. Nothing looks as bad in the daylight as it does at night.”
Not until there was a touch of dawn in the sky did David sleep. His mind was out of control. It was a separate thing, alive, willful, and free of any control he could exercise upon it. It swooped from childhood to the present; it burrowed through history; it pleaded for a miracle — what of Joan of Arc, what of Lourdes? What of Israel? He was transparent and too clever, and he saw through himself. He said to himself, If ever a man sold his birthright for a pot of lentils, the man is myself, and like Esau, I can’t get it back.
Lucy waking him gently. “When did you fall asleep?”
“It was beginning to get light.”
“I hate to wake you, David. The kids are off to school. It’s nine-fifteen. I’d let you sleep, but Mrs. Shapiro called. You missed the morning service, but they managed without you. Now there’s a little boy, name of Herbert Cohen, waiting in your office. He was excused from school this morning because he has a tutorial with you.”
“Oh, yes, of course. I know the boy. Oh, no, he must not be sent away. Telephone Mrs. Shapiro and tell her I’ll be there in ten or fifteen minutes.”
“Will you eat an egg?”
“No. No, thank you, Lucy. Just coffee.”
Fifteen minutes was too optimistic. It was almost ten o’clock when he got to the synagogue and said to Mrs. Shapiro, “Is he still there?”
“He’s there. You’re his hero, Rabbi. I’m sure he would stay all day and all night as long as he knows you are coming.”
“Please, hold my calls for one hour.”
David tried to give at least two hours of individual attention to each of the boys who turned thirteen and faced his Bar Mitzvah. Herbert Cohen was a special case, a gentle, somewhat pathetic little boy, one of those children to whom puberty comes late. He came from a family that had joined the Temple Shalom because there was no other synagogue within miles, and his inability to cope with the requirements of the Bar Mitzvah and his fear of failure touched David deeply. He could not learn Hebrew. David had encountered this now and again in other children, an absolute block against learning a language so different from any Western tongue. Part of this, David came to realize, was due to the method of instruction. The synagogue had hired a Hebrew teacher, a Polish Jew who was a poor teacher and whose English was completely inadequate. David would have fired him half a dozen times over, but each time he thought of it, he also recalled the concentration camp number tattooed on the man’s arm. The result was that the man remained in the job.
When David came into his office, Herbert Cohen, a small, skinny boy in a large chair, looked up and smiled tentatively. “Good morning, Rabbi,” he said.
“Sorry I’m so late.”
“That’s all right. It doesn’t matter.”
“Oh?”
“It’s no good, Rabbi. I can’t learn Hebrew — I can’t. I told you that, and you wouldn’t believe me. I lie to my father. He’ll kill me when he finds out the truth.”
“He won’t kill you, Herbert. We’ll do your Haftarah in English, and it will be perfectly fine.”
“We can’t!”
“Why can’t we? It’s not the language that’s important; it’s what is being said. You know, in earlier times, the Haftarah was read by a small child, and then as now it was a selection from Prophets. Not as a Bar Mitzvah thing, mind you. They didn’t have the Bar Mitzvah ceremony until the Middle Ages, but because” — he hesitated here — “because God might listen better to the voice of innocence. You see, Herbert, the prophets were the defenders of the people. In those days, kings, rulers, generals, were as cruel and crazy as they are today, and only the prophets stood between them and the people. That is why I gave you your Haftarah from Isaiah. You will read it in English.”
“You’re sure, Rabbi?”
“Of course I’m sure. And I think it will be more valid if people understand what you are reading.”
“What will I tell my father?”
“Tell him what I said.”
“He’ll be mad.”
The boy’s prediction was correct. David and Lucy and their two children were at dinner when Mr. Cohen called. “I want to talk to you, Rabbi,” he said.
“Can you come to my office at the synagogue tomorrow?”
“No, I can’t. I’m a working man, mister, not one of your rich Jews up there at Leighton Ridge. I want to see you tonight.”
“All right. In my office at the synagogue, an hour from now.”
“Who was that?” Lucy asked. “He has a strong voice. We heard him in here.”
“Cohen. He’s a house painter in Bridgeport, and he lives in Fairfield. He’s here only because he had a fight with both rabbis at the local synagogues down there, and I imagine he’s ready to eat me up because I told his boy that he could read his Haftarah in English.”
“When I was a kid,” Lucy said, “I was convinced that the Bible was written in English.”
“Mom,” Aaron said, “not really?”
“I’m afraid Mr. Cohen is convinced that it was never translated.”
Mr. Cohen was also convinced that the Temple Shalom was not really a synagogue, and he said as much as he stamped into David’s office an hour later and, apropos of nothing yet said, snorted, “If there’s anything turns my stomach, Rabbi, it’s this business of calling a shul a temple. I don’t like it!” In the nineteenth century in Europe, synagogue and school were combined in one building, called by the Yiddish word shul.
Cohen was a short, barrel-chested man with heavy brows.
He wore his hostility like a weapon.
“Well we’re not here to talk about what to call a synagogue, David said, temporizing. “Myself, I’m not fond of calling a synagogue a temple. I try to avoid the word temple where I can.”
“I should thank you for the opinion.”
“Won’t you sit down,” David said.
“I can say what I came to say standing. In all my life, Rabbi Hartman, in all my life I never heard of a boy being a Bar Mitzvah and singing his Haftarah in English! In all my life, I never even heard of someone suggesting something like that. You going to tell me my boy can’t learn to read Hebrew? That’s crap, and you know it is! My son is as smart as any other kid. It’s that goddamned idiot Polack you got teaching the kids.”
“He isn’t the best language teacher, but even with the best, there are children who cannot relate to another language, especially a language as different and difficult as Hebrew.”
“I told you that’s crap. I’ve put up with this lousy Reform Judaism long enough. Seems to me you’re as Jewish as the Pope. Now you listen, either you get another Hebrew teacher, or I take my son out of here and find a Jewish synagogue.”
“You’re very angry,” David said, “and I can understand your anger. You feel that we are saying that your boy is backward, that he lacks intelligence —”
“That’s what you’re saying! You’re damned right I’m angry!”
“But that’s not what I’m saying. The ability to absorb a language has nothing to do with intelligence. Herbert is one of the most sensitive and intelligent children we have.”
“Yeah? Well, let me tell you this, Rabbi. I don’t want a sensitive kid, not in your terms — and the kid tells me you teach them that war is wrong and somebody don’t have the right to defend himself. Well, that’s crap too. You’re telling me Israel don’t have the right to defend itself. So I’m taking my kid out and putting him where he can learn to be Jewish.”
