PLAYOFFS.

When I was a child, my parents and teachers told me about a man who was very strong. They told me that he could lift mountains. They told me that he could part the sea. They told me that it was important to keep this man happy: when we obeyed what the man had commanded, he liked us. He liked us so much that he killed anyone who didn't like us. But when we didn't obey what he had commanded the man didn't like us at all. He hated us. Some days he hated us so much that he killed us; other days he let other people kill us. We call these days "holidays." On Purim, we remember how the Persians tried to kill us. On Passover, we remember how the Egyptians tried to kill us. On Hanukkah, we remember how the Greeks tried to kill us.

"Blessed is He," we prayed.

As bad as these punishments could be, they were nothing compared with the vengeance the man himself meted out: plagues, famines, floods. Hitler may have killed the Jews, but this man drowned the world. This was the song we sang about him in kindergarten:

God is here,, God is there., God is truly everywhere!

Then snacks, and a fitful nap.

I was raised in the largely Orthodox Jewish town of Monsey, New York. Saturday mornings found me dressed in a sky-blue suit and brown clip-on tie, walking the leafy streets to synagogue. My father marched alongside me in a starched white shirt and a gray fedora, his heels hammering the pavement as we overtook the slower members of the congregation. Every so often, a car passed by--people from the nearby towns of Suffern and Pomona, out for a scenic drive--and I would feel a surge of pride at the solemn picture we made: fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, all of us out to warm ourselves by the soothing fire of our belief. Then my father would step into the road and shake his fist, shouting at the drivers to slow the hell down.

"Ahnta-Semitin," he grumbled in Yiddish. Anti-Semites. "Kill a Jew, then you'll be happy."