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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
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."
Monsey was a pretty town where everything was forbidden. One was forbidden to drive on the Sabbath, one was forbidden to take four steps without a yarmulke, one was forbidden to eat meat with dairy. Having eaten meat, one had to abstain from dairy for six hours; having eaten dairy, one had to abstain from meat for three hours. One was always forbidden to eat pig, at least until the Messiah arrived--only then, Rabbi Goldfisher taught us in the fourth grade, would the wicked be punished, the dead be resurrected, and the pigs be kosher.
"Yay!" I said, high-fiving my best friend, Dov.
Rabbi Goldfisher fixed a furious gaze upon us.
"You should be so excited," he said, "on the Day of God's Judgment."
The people of Monsey were terrified of God, and they taught me to be terrified of Him, too. I learned that Sarah would one day laugh at Him, so He made her barren; that Job, completely ruined, had asked "Why?" and God had come down to earth, taken him by the collar, and howled, "Who the hell do you think you are?" In early autumn, when the leaves choked, turned colors, and fell to their deaths, everyone gathered together in synagogues across the town and wondered, aloud and in unison, how God was going to kill them: Who by water and who by fire, who by sword, who by beast, who by famine, who by thirst, who by storm, who by plague, who by strangulation and who by stoning.
Then lunch, and a fitful nap.
At twenty-one, the age at which my rabbis declared a young man should be fathering a child, I found myself living in a studio apartment in Manhattan, where the bookshelves sagged with the weight of Judaism's holiest books and the collection of pornographic magazines I kept hidden behind them. The teachers from my youth were gone, but the man they'd told me about was still around. I couldn't shake Him. I read Spinoza, Nietzsche, Dawkins--nothing helped. One night, I met a woman from London named Orli. Orli was also Jewish, though barely observant, with dark-green eyes and long black hair. On our third date, we went to a New York Rangers game, where for three long periods she shouted "Wanker!" at the referees, while I, having fallen in love, waited for a puck to ricochet off the goalpost, sail into the stands, and strike her, hard, at the invisible "X" that the Almighty had drawn on her forehead. (That would be so God.)
But Orli made it out of Madison Square Garden unharmed,...
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