VI
In the third of his imaginary dialogues with God (whom he pictured as an imposing man, somewhat the dimensions of one of the elders but much more neatly trimmed and not loaded down with the paraphernalia with which they conducted themselves) Leviticus said, “I don’t believe any of it. Not any part of it at all. It’s ridiculous.”
“Doubt is another part of faith,” God said. “Doubt and belief intertwine; both can be conditions of reverence. There is more divinity in the doubt of a wise man than in the acceptance of fools.”
“That’s just rhetoric,” Leviticus said; “it explains nothing.”
“The devices of belief must move within the confines of rhetoric, God said. “Rhetoric is the poor machinery of the profound and incontrovertible. Actually, it’s not a matter of doubt. You’re just very uncomfortable.”
“That’s right. I’m uncomfortable. I don’t see why Judaism imposes this kind of suffering.”
“Religion is suffering” God said with a modest little laugh, “and if you think Judaism is difficult upon its participants, you should get a look at some of the others sometimes. Animal sacrifice, immolation, the ceremony of tongues. Oh, most terrible! Not that everyone doesn’t have a right to their point of view,” God added hastily. “Each must reach me, each in his way and through his tradition. Believe me, Leviticus, you haven’t got the worst of it.”
“I protest. I protest this humiliation.”
“It isn’t easy for me, either,” God pointed out. “I’ve gone through cycles of repudiation for billions of years. Still, one must go on.”
“I’ve got to get out of here. It’s destroying my health; my physical condition is ruined. When am I going to leave?”
“I’m sorry,” God said, “that decision is not in my hands.”
“But you’re omnipotent.”
“My omnipotence is only my will working through the diversity of twenty billion other wills. Each is determined, and yet each is free.”
“That sounds to me like a lousy excuse,” Leviticus said sullenly. “I don’t think that makes any sense at all.”
“I do the best I can,” God said, and after a long, thin pause added sorrowfully, “You don’t think that any of this is easy for me either, do you?”
VII
Leviticus has the dim recollection from the historical tapes, none of them well attended to, that before the time of the complexes, before the time of great changes, there had been another kind of existence, one during which none of the great churches, Judaism included, had been doing particularly well in terms of absolute number of participants, relative proportion of the population. Cults had done all right, but cults had had only the most marginal connection to the great churches, and in most cases had repudiated them, leading, in the analyses of certain of the historical tapes, to the holocaust that had followed, and the absolute determination on the part of the Risen, that they would not permit this to happen again, that they would not allow the cults to appropriate all of the energy, the empirical demonstrations, for themselves, but instead would make sure that the religions were reconverted to hard ritual, that the ritual demonstrations following would be strong and convincing enough to keep the cults out of business and through true worship and true belief (although with enough ritual now to satisfy the mass of people that religion could be made visible) stave off yet another holocaust. At least, this was what Leviticus had gathered from the tapes, but then, you could never be sure about this, and the tapes were all distributed under the jurisdiction of the elders anyway, and what the elders would do with material to manipulate it to their own purposes was well known.
Look, for one thing, at what they had done to Leviticus.
VIII
“I’ll starve in here,” he had said to the elders desperately, as they were conveying him down the aisle toward the ark. “I’ll deteriorate. I’ll go insane from the confinement. If I get ill, no one will be there to help me.”
“Food will be given you each day. You will have the Torah and the Talmud, the Feast of Life itself to comfort you and to grant you peace. You will allow the spirit of God to move within you.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Leviticus said. “I told you, I have very little belief in any of this. How can the spirit—?”
“Belief means nothing,” the elders said. They seemed to speak in unison, which was impossible, of course (how could they have such a level of shared anticipation of the others’ remarks; rather, it was that they spoke one by one, with similar voice quality—that would be a more likely explanation of the phenomenon, mysticism having, so far as Leviticus knew, very little relation to rational Judaism). “You are its object, not its subject.”
“Aha!” Leviticus said then, frantically raising one finger to forestall them as they began to lead him painfully into the ark, pushing him, tugging, buckling his limbs. “If belief does not matter, if I am merely object rather than subject, then how can I be tenanted by the spirit?”
“That,” the elders said, finishing the job, patting him into place, one of them extracting a rag to whip the wood of the ark speedily to high gloss, cautiously licking a finger, applying it to the surface to take out an imagined particle of dust, “that is very much your problem and not ours, you see,” and closed the doors upon him, leaving him alone with scrolls and Talmud, cloth, and the sound of scrambling birds. In a moment he heard a grinding noise as key was inserted into lock, then a snap as tumblers inverted. They were locking him in.
Well, he had known that. That, at least, was not surprising. Tradition had its roots; the commitment to the ark was supposed to be voluntary—a joyous expression of commitment, that was; the time spent in the ark was supposed to be a time of repentance and great interior satisfaction…. But all of that to one side, the elders, balancing off the one against the other, as was their wont, arriving at a careful and highly modulated view of the situation, had ruled in their wisdom that it was best to keep the ark locked at all times, excepting, of course, the adoration. That was the elders for you. They took everything into account, and having done that, made the confinement, as they said, his problem.
IX
Now the ritual of the Sabbath evening service is over, and the rabbi is delivering his sermon. Something about the many rivers of Judaism, each of them individual, Bowing into that great sea of tradition and belief. The usual material. Leviticus knows that this is the Sabbath service; he can identify it by certain of the prayers and chants, although he has lost all extrinsic sense of time, of course, in the ark. For that matter, he suspects, the elders have lost all extrinsic sense of time as well; it is no more Friday now than Thursday or Saturday, but at a certain arbitrary time after the holocaust, he is given to understand, the days, the months, the years themselves were re-created and assigned, and therefore, if the elders say it is Friday, it is Friday, just as if they say it is the year thirty-seven, it is the year thirty-seven, and not fifty seven hundred something or other, or whatever it was when the holocaust occurred. (In his mind, as a kind of shorthand, he has taken to referring to the holocaust as the H; the H did this; certain things happened to cause the H, but he is not sure that this would make sense to other people, and as a matter of fact wonders whether or not this might not be the sign of a deranged consciousness.) Whatever the elders say it is, it is, although God in the imaginary dialogues has assured him that the elders, in their own fashion, are merely struggling with the poor tools at their command and are no less fallible than he, Leviticus.
He shall take upon himself, in any event, these commandments, and shall bind them for frontlets between his eyes. After the sermon, when the ark is opened for the adoration, he will lunge from it and confront them with what they have become, with what they have made of him, with what together they have made of God. He will do that, and for signposts upon his house as well, that they shall remember and do those commandments and be holy. Holy, holy. Oh, their savior and their hope, they have been worshiping him as their fathers did in ancient days, but en
ough of this, quite enough; the earth being his dominion and all the beasts and fish thereof, it is high time that some sort of reckoning of the changes be made.
Highly unfair, Leviticus thinks, crouching, awaiting the opening of the ark, but then again, he must (as always) force himself to see all sides of the question: very possibly, if Stala had approved of his position, had granted him sympathy, had agreed with him that what the elders were doing was unjust and unfair … well, then, he might have been far more cheerfully disposed to put up with his fate. If only she, if only someone, had seen him as a martyr rather than as a usual part of a very usual process. Everything might have changed, but then again, it might have been the same.
X
The book of Daniel, he recollects, had been very careful and very precise in giving, with numerology and symbol, the exact time when the H would begin. Daniel had been specific; he had alluded to precisely that course of events at which period of time that would signal the coming (or the second coming, depending upon your pursuit); the only trouble with it was that there had been so many conflicting interpretations over thousands of years that for all intents and purposes the predictive value of Daniel for the H had been lost; various interpreters saw too many signs of rising in the East, too many beasts of heaven, stormings of the tabernacle, too many uprisings among the cattle or the chieftains to enable them to get the H down right, once and for all. A lot of them, hence, had been embarrassed; many cults, hinged solely upon their interpretation of Daniel and looking for an apocalyptic date, had gotten themselves overcommitted, and going up on the mountaintops to await the end, had lost most of their membership.
Of course, the H had come, and with it the floods, the falling, the rising, and the tumult in the lands, and it was possible that Daniel had gotten it precisely right, after all, if only you could look back on it in retrospect and get it right, but as far as Leviticus was concerned, there was only one overriding message that you might want to take from the tapes if you were interested in this kind of thing: you did not want to pin it down too closely. Better, as the elders did, to kind of leave the issue indeterminate and in flux. Better, as God himself had (imaginarily) pointed out, to say that doubt is merely the reverse coin of belief, both of them motes in the bowels of the Hound of Heaven.
XI
The rabbi, adoring the ever-living God and rendering praise unto him, inserts the key into the ark, the tumblers fall open, the doors creak and gape, and Leviticus finds himself once again staring into the old man’s face, his eyes congested with pain as he reaches in trembling toward one of the scrolls, his cheeks dancing in the light, the elders grouped behind him attending carefully; and instantly Leviticus strikes: he reaches out a hand, yanks the rabbi out of the way, and then tumbles from the ark. He had meant to leap but did not realize how shriveled his muscles would be from disuse; what he had intended to be a vault is instead a collapse to the stones under the ark, but yet he is able to move. He is able to move. He pulls himself falteringly to hands and knees, gasping, the rabbi mumbling in the background, the elders looking at him with shocked expressions, too astonished for the instant to move. The instant now is all that he needs. He has not precipitated what he has done in the hope of having a great deal of time.
“Look at me!” Leviticus shrieks, struggling erect, hands banging, head shaking. “Look at me, look at what I’ve become, look at what dwells in the heart of the ark!” And indeed, they are looking all of them, the entire congregation, Stala in the women’s section, and to face, palm open, extended, all of them stunned in the light of his gaze. “Look at me!” he shouts again. “You can’t do this to people, do you understand that? You cannot do it!” And the elders come upon him, recovered from their astonishment, to seize him with hands like metal, the rabbi rolling and rolling on the floor, deep into some chant that Leviticus cannot interpret, the congregation gathered now to rush upon him; but too late, it has (as he must at some level have known) been too late, from the beginning, and as the rabbi chants, the elders strain, the congregation rushes … time inverts, and the real, the longexpected, the true H with its true Host begins.
HORACE L. GOLD
Warm, Dark Places
Much of Jewish humor is astringent, angry, dark, sarcastic, and oftentimes the barbs are directed at the Jew himself. It is the Outsider’s way of coping with and exorcising fear. Horace L. Gold’s “Warm, Dark Places,” written at top of Gold’s form, is just such a story. It prompted John W. Campbell, the editor who ushered in what has become known as “the golden age of science fiction” to call it “the nastiest story I’ve ever read!” But when the story appeared in Campbell’s Unknown, Gold was revolted and angered by the Edd Cartier illustration that accompanied it. Gold writes: “The caricature, straight out of Die Sturmer, kept me from offering it for reprint ever since—I was too bitterly ashamed to let anyone see it, Jew or Gentile.”
I am happy to bring this story out of the dark. It is, in fact, the sequel to Gold’s famous “Trouble with Water,” which appeared in Wandering Stars. If you remember Greenberg the concessionaire who was cursed by a water gnome, you’ll also remember the terrible (yet terribly logical) consequences that followed. Now, meet Kaplan the tailor, who is a bit too high-handed with an Eastern holyman….
*
KAPLAN TRIED TO MAKE a gesture of impatience. It was impossible because his arms were piled high with clothing. He followed his wife’s pointing finger and succeeded in shrugging contemptuously.
Clad in pathetic rags, the hairiest, dirtiest tramp in the world stood outside the plate-glass window of Kaplan’s dry-cleaning store and eagerly watched the stubby, garment-laden figure as it waddled toward the bandbox cleaning vat.
“Him?” Kaplan echoed sarcastically. “A bum like him is going to drive us out of business? Do you mind if I am asking you what with, Mrs. Genius?”
“Like my mother told me,” Mrs. Kaplan retorted angrily, “a book you can’t tell by its covers. So, rags he’s wearing and he’s dirty, that means he can’t have money? You don’t read in the papers, I suppose. Blind beggars don’t own apartment houses and chauffeurs, I suppose, and people on relief don’t ride cars down to get their checks. Besides, such a feeling I get when I look at him—like when a mouse looks at a cat.”
“Pah!” Kaplan broke in good-humoredly. “Some foolishness.”
“All right, Mr. Einstein, he’s standing out there with a pencil and paper because somewhere else he ain’t got to go.”
“You think maybe you’re wrong?” Kaplan almost snapped testily. “No. He’s going to the Ritz for supper and he stopped in while he should have his dress suit pressed! Molly, a whole year you been annoying me with this lazy, no-good loafer. Ain’t I got enough on my head as it is?”
Molly pursed her lips and went back to sewing buttons on a dress that hung from a hook. With his arms still loaded, Kaplan clambered up on the window platform, where the bandbox vat stood. How he ever had the strength of character to refrain from fondling his beautiful machine, Kaplan never understood. It really was a lovely thing: red, black and chromium, a masterpiece of a dry-cleaning machine that attracted school children and summer residents.
In spite of his confident attitude, Kaplan felt less certain of himself now. The moment he had stepped on the platform, the tramp darted to the middle of the window.
Defiantly, Kaplan opened the door to the vat and tried to stuff in the garments without regard for scientific placement. They stuck, of course. Kaplan raised his head and glowered at the tramp, who craned and pressed his ugly, stubbled face against the polished glass, trying to peer into the open tank.
“Aha!” Kaplan muttered, when he saw his enemy’s anxiety. “Now I got you!”
“Did you say something?” Molly asked ironically.
“No, no!” he said hastily. “So fat I’m getting—”
It was uncomfortable working in that position, but Kaplan shoved his slightly gross body between the opening and his audience. Straining from above and getting in
his own way, he put the clothes in properly around the tumbler. Then he shut the door quickly and turned on the switch. The garments twirled slowly in the cleansing fluid.
Kaplan descended the stairs with an air of triumph.
That had happened every workday for a year, yet neither the little tailor nor his degraded foe had lost the original zest of the silent, bitter struggle. Once more Kaplan had defeated him! On his victory march back to the pressing machine, Kaplan allowed himself a final leer at the fallen.
But this time it was his face, not the tramp’s, that slipped into anxiety. He stood trembling and watching his enemy’s contented face, and fear lashed him.
The tramp was holding a large piece of brown grocery bag against the hitherto clean window with one hand. With the other he held a stump of pencil, which he used for checking unseen marks against whatever parts of the machine he could note from outside.
But what frightened Kaplan was his complacent satisfaction with his work. Usually he shook his head bewilderedly and wandered off, to reappear as eagerly at four thirty the next afternoon.
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