In this manner Og ha-Golem, who had endless patience, lived a thousand and twenty years. By radio the Galaxy heard of the strange work of strange creatures, and over hundreds of years colonists who wished to call themselves b’nei Avraham drifted inward to re-create the world Pardes. They were not great in number, but they made a world. From pardes is derived “Paradise” but in the humble world of Pardes the peoples drained more of the swamps and planted fruitful orchards and pleasant gardens. All of these were named for their creators, except one.
When Og discovered that his functions were deteriorating, he refused replacement parts and directed that when he stopped all of his components must be dismantled and scattered to the ends of the earth, for fear of idolatry. But a garden was named for him, may his spirit rest in justice and his carapace rust in peace, and the one being who had no organic life is remembered with love among living things.
Here the people live, doing good and evil, contending with God and arguing with each other as usual, and all keep the Tradition as well as they can. Only the descendants of the aboriginal inhabitants, once called Cnidori, jealously guard for themselves the privilege of the name b’nei Zohar, and they are considered by the others to be snobbish, clannish, and stiff-necked.
BARRY N. MALZBERG
Leviticus: In the Ark
The very basis and focus of the Jewish religion is The Law, which regulates every facet and activity of Jewish life. It is the symbolic structure of tradition and ceremony within which the Jew lives. It is complex, demanding, and alive … as alive as thought itself.
The revelation of Moses on Mount Sinai gave us the Torah; but in that single event is the implication of all the law that would follow, the revealed oral law, or Talmud, as reported by the sages. The Talmud contains fourteen centuries of jurisprudence, close legal analysis, and the color and pith and pageantry of Jewish life. Here are found the myriad regulations, prohibitions, and instructions that bind every practicing Jew. For the believer, The Law is the divine instruction which connects him with his God. By being scrupulously faithful to The Law, the Jew hallows and informs even the mundane moments of his life.
But for the unbeliever, or the unsure, The Law is a prison.
*
I
CONDITIONS ARE DIFFICULT and services are delayed. Conditions have been difficult for some time, services have been delayed more often than being prompt, but never has it weighed upon Leviticus as it does now. Part of this has to do with his own situation: cramped in the ark, Torahs jammed into his left ear and right kneecap, heavy talmudic bindings wedged uncomfortably under his buttocks, he is past the moments of quiet meditation that for so long have sustained him. Now he is in great pain, his body is shrieking for release; he has a vivid image of himself bursting from the ark, the doors sliding open, his arms outstretched, his beard flapping in the strange breezes of the synagogue as he cries denunciation. I can no longer bear this position. There must be some Yiddish equivalent for this. Very well, he will cry it in Yiddish.
No, he will do nothing of the sort. He mill remain within the ark, six by four, jammed amidst the holy writings. At times he is sure that he has spent several weeks within, at others, all sense of time eludes him; perhaps it has been only a matter of hours … well, make it a few days since he has been in here. It does not matter. A minute is as a century in the Eye of God, he remembers—or did it go the other way?—and vague murmurs that he can hear through the not fully soundproofed walls of his chamber inform him that the service is about to begin. In due course, just before the adoration begins, they will fling open the doors of the ark and he will be able to gaze upon them for a few moments, breathe the somewhat less dense air of the synagogue, endure past many moments of this sort because of his sudden, shuddering renewal of contact with the congregation, but, ah God! … it is difficult. Too much has been demanded of him; he is suffering deeply.
Leviticus turns within the limited confines of his position, tries to find a more comfortable point of accommodation. Soon the service will begin. After the ritual chants and prayers, after the sermon and the hymn, will come the adoration. At the adoration the opening of the ark. He will stretch. He will stand. He will stretch out a hand and greet them. He will cast light upon their eyes and upon the mountains: that they shall remember and do all his commandments and be holy unto him.
He wonders if his situation has made him megalomaniac.
II
Two weeks before, just at the point when Leviticus’ point of commitment to the ark loomed before him, he had appeared in the rabbi’s cubicle and made a plea for dispensation. “I am a sick man,” he had said, “I do not think that I will be able to stand the confinement. Also, and I must be quite honest with you, rabbi, I doubt my religious faith and commitment. I am not sure that I can function as that embodiment of ritual which placement in the ark symbolizes.” This was not quite true; at least, the issue of religious faith had not occurred to Leviticus in either way; he was not committed to the religion, not quite against it either, it did not matter enough … but he had gathered from particularly reliable reports going through the congregation that one of the best ways of getting out of the ark was to plead a lack of faith. Perhaps he had gotten it wrong. The rabbi looked at him for a long time, and finally, drawing his robes tightly around him, retreating to the wall, looked at Leviticus as if he were a repulsed object. “Then perhaps your stay in the ark will do you some good,” he had said; “it will enable you to find time for meditation and prayer. Also, religious belief has nothing to do with the role of the tenant. Does the wine in the goblet conceive of the nature of the sacrament it represents? In the same way, the tenant is merely the symbol.”
“I haven’t been feeling well,” Leviticus mumbled. “I’ve been having chest pains. I’ve been having seizures of doubt. Cramps in the lower back; I don’t think that I can—”
“Yes you can,” the rabbi said with a dreadful expression, “and yes you will,” and had sent Leviticus out into the cold and casting light of the settlement, beginning to come to terms with the realization that he could not, could not under any circumstances, escape the obligation thrust upon him. Perhaps he had been foolish to have thought that he could. Perhaps he should not have paid credence to the rumors. He returned to his cubicle in a foul temper, set the traps to privacy and sullenly put through the tape of the Union Prayer Book, Revised Edition: For the High Holy Days. If you really were going to have to do something like this, he guessed that a little bit of hard background wouldn’t hurt. But it made no sense. The writings simply made no sense. He shut off the tapes and for a long time gave no further thought to any of this, until the morning, when, in absolute disbelief, he found the elders in his unit, implacable in their costume, come to take him to the ark. Tallis and tefillim.
III
In the ark, Leviticus ponders his condition while the services go on outside. He has taken to self-pity during his confinement; he has a tendency to snivel a little. It is really not fair for him, a disbelieving man but one who has never made his disbelief a point of contention, to be thrown into such a position, kept there for such an extended period of time. Ritual is important, and he for one is not to say that the enactment of certain rote practices does not lend reassurance, may indeed be a metaphor for some kind of reality which he cannot apprehend … but is it right that all of this should be at his expense? He has never entered into disputation with the elders on their standards of belief; why should they force theirs upon him?
A huge volume of the Talmud jabs his buttocks, its cover a painful little concentrated point of pain, and cursing, Leviticus bolts from it, rams his head against the beam forming half of the ceiling of the ark, bends, reaches, seizes the volume, and with all his force hurls it three feet into the flat wall opposite. He has hoped for a really satisfying concussion, some mark of his contempt that will be heard outside of the ark, will impress and disconcert the congregation, but there simply has not been room enough to generate impact: the volume fall
s softly, turgidly across a knee, and he slaps at it in fury, little puffs of dust coming from the cover, inflaming his sinuses. He curses again, wondering if this apostasy, committed within the very place in which, according to what he understands, the spirit of God dwells, will be sufficient to end his period of torture, release him from this one kind of bondage into at least another, but nothing whatsoever happens.
He could have expected that, he thinks. If the tenant of the ark is indeed symbol rather than substance, then it would not matter what he did here or what he thought; only his presence would matter. And fling volumes of the Talmud, scrape at the Torahs, snivel away as he will, he is nevertheless in residence. Nothing that he can do will make any difference at all; his presence here is the only testament that they will need.
Step by tormenting step Leviticus has been down this path of reasoning-after-apostasy a hundred times during his confinement. Fortunately for him, these are emotional outbursts which he forgets almost upon completion, so that he has no memory of them when he starts upon the next; and this sense of discovery—the renewal of his rage, so to speak, every time afresh—has thus sustained him in the absence of more real benefits and will sustain him yet. Also, during the long night hours when only he is in the temple, he is able to have long, imagined dialogues with God, which to no little degree also sustain him, even if his visualization of God is a narrow and parochial one.
IV
The first time that the doors had been flung open during the adoration and all of the congregation had looked in upon him, Leviticus had become filled with shame, but that quickly passed when he realized that no one really thought anything of it and that the attention of the elders and the congregation was not upon him but upon the sacred scripts that one by one the elders withdrew, brought to the podium, and read with wavering voice and fingers while Leviticus, hunched over naked in an uncomfortable fetal position, could not have been there at all, for all the difference it made. He could have bolted from the ark, flung open his arms, shrieked to the congregation, “Look at me, look at me, don’t you see what you’re doing!” but he had not; he had been held back in part by fear, another part by constraint, still a third part from the realization that no one in the ark had ever done it. He had never seen it happen; back through all the generations that he was able to seek through accrued knowledge, the gesture was without precedent. The tenant of the ark had huddled quietly throughout the term of his confinement, had kept himself in perfect restraint when exposed; why should this not continue? Tradition and the awesome power of the elders had held him in check. He could not interrupt the flow of the services. He could deal with the predictable, which was a term of confinement and then release, just like everyone who had preceded him, but what he could not control was any conception of the unknown. If he made a spectacle of himself during the adoration, there was no saying what might happen then. The elders might take vengeance upon him. They might turn away from the thought of vengeance and simply declare that his confinement be extended for an indefinite period for apostasy. It was very hard to tell exactly what they would do. This fear of the unknown, Leviticus had decided through his nights of pondering and imaginary dialogue, was probably what had enabled the situation to go on as long as it had.
It was hard to say exactly when he had reached the decision that he could no longer accept his position, his condition, his fate, wait out the time of his confinement, entertain the mercy of the elders, and return to the congregation. It was hard to tell at exactly what point he had realized that he could not do this; there was no clear point of epiphany, no moment at which—unlike a religious conversion—he could see himself as having gone outside the diagram of possibility, unutterably changed. All that he knew was that the decision had slowly crept into him, perhaps when he was sleeping, and without a clear point of definition, had reached absolute firmness: he would confront them at the adoration now. He would force them to look at him. He would show them what he, and by implication they, had become: so trapped within a misunderstood tradition, so wedged within the suffocating confines of the ark that they had lost any overriding sense of purpose, the ability to perceive wholly the madness that they and the elders had perpetuated. He would force them to understand this as the sum point of their lives, and when it was over, he would bolt from the synagogue naked, screaming, back to his cubicle, where he would reassemble his clothing and make final escape from the complex … and leave them, not him, to decide what they would now make of the shattered ruins of their lives.
The long period of confinement, self-examination, withdrawal, and physical privation had, perhaps, made Leviticus somewhat unstable.
V
Just before the time when the elders had appeared and had taken him away, Leviticus had made his last appeal, not to them, certainly not to the rabbi, but to Stala, who had shared to a certain point his anguish and fear of entrapment. “I don’t see why I have to go there,” he said to her, lying tight in the instant after fornication. “It’s stupid. It’s sheer mysticism. And besides that, it hasn’t any relevance.”
“But you must go,” she said, putting a hand on his cheek. “You have been asked, and you must.” She was not stupid, he thought, merely someone who had never had to question assumptions, as he was now being forced to. “It is ordained. It won’t be that bad; you’re supposed to learn a lot.”
“You go.”
She gave a little gasping intake of breath and rolled from him. “You know that’s impossible,” she said. “Women can’t go.”
“In the reform tradition they can.”
“But we’re not in the reform tradition,” she said; “this is the high Orthodox.”
“I tend to think of it more in the line of being progressive.”
“You know, Leviticus,” she said, sitting, breathing unevenly—he could see her breasts hanging from her in the darkness like little scrolls, like little scrolls, oh, his confinement was very much on his mind, he could see—“it’s just ridiculous that you should say something like that to me, that you should even suggest it. We’re talking about our tradition now, and our tradition is very clear on this point, and it’s impossible for a woman to go. Even if she wanted, she just couldn’t—”
“All right,” he said, “all right.”
“No,” Stala said, “no I won’t stop discussing this, you were the one to raise it, Leviticus, not me, and I just won’t have any of it. I didn’t think you were that kind of person. I thought that you accepted the traditions, that you believed in them; in fact, it was an encouragement to me to think, to really think, that I had found someone who believed in a pure, solid unshaken way, and I was really proud of you, even prouder when I found that you had been selected, but now you’ve changed everything. I’m beginning to be afraid that the only reason you believed in the traditions was because they weren’t causing you any trouble and you didn’t have to sacrifice yourself personally, but as soon as you became involved, you moved away from them.” She was standing now, moving toward her robe, which had been tossed in the fluorescence at the far end of his cubicle; looking toward it during intercourse, he had thought that the sight of it was the most tender and affecting thing he had ever known, that she had cast her garments aside for him, that she had committed herself trustfully in nakedness against him for the night, and all of this despite the fact that he was undergoing what he took to be the positive humiliation of the confinement; now, as she flung it angrily on herself, he wondered if he had been wrong, if that casting aside had been a gesture less tender than fierce, whether or not she might have been—and he could hardly bear this thought, but one must after all, press on—perversely excited by images of how he would look naked and drawn in upon himself in the ark, his genitals clamped between his thighs, talmudic statements by the rabbis Hill and Ben Bag Bag his only companions in the many long nights to come. He did not want to think of it, did not want to see her in this new perspective, and so leaped to his feet, fleet as a hart, and said, “But it’s not fair. I tell
you, it isn’t fair.”
“Of course it isn’t fair. That’s why it’s so beautiful.”
“Well, how would you like it? How would you like to be confined in—”
“Leviticus,” she said, “I don’t want to talk to you about this anymore. Leviticus,” she added, “I think I was wrong about you, you’ve hurt me very much. Leviticus,” she concluded, “if you don’t leave me right now, this moment, I’ll go to the elders and tell them exactly what you’re saying and thinking, and you know what will happen to you then,” and he had let her go, nothing else to do, the shutter of his cubicle coming open, the passage of her body halving the light from the hall, then the light exposed again, and she was gone; he closed the shutter, he was alone in his cubicle again.
“It isn’t fair,” he said aloud. “She wouldn’t like it so much if this was Reform and she were faced with the possibility of going in there someday,” but this gave him little comfort; in fact, it gave him no comfort at all. It seemed to lead him right back to where he had started—futile, amazed protest at the injustice and folly of what was being done for him—and he had gone into an unhappy sleep thinking that something, something would have to be done about this; perhaps he could take the case out of the congregation. If the ordinators were led to understand what kind of rites were being committed in the name of high Orthodoxy, they would take a strong position against this, seal up the complex, probably scatter the congregation throughout a hundred other complexes … and it was this which had given him ease, tossed him into a long murmuring sleep replete with satisfaction that he had finally found a way to deal with this (because he knew instinctively that the ordinators would not like this), but the next morning, cunningly, almost as if they had been informed by Stala (perhaps they had), the elders had come to take him to the ark, and that had been the end of that line of thought. He supposed that he could still do it, complain to the ordinators—that was, after his confinement was over—but at that point it hardly seemed worth it. It hardly seemed worth it at all. For one thing, he would be out of the ark by then and would not have to face it for a very, very long time, if ever. So why bother with the ordinators? He would have to take a more direct position, take it up with the congregation itself. Surely once they understood his agony, they could not permit it to continue. Could they?
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