Айзек Азимов: Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction

Aaron David is close to crying. “If only—if—” He bites his lip.

“If—,” I say. “If—You know what we say about if. If your grandmother would have had testicles, she’d have been your grandfather. Consider the problem: if you want to be a rabbi, especially a Levittown rabbi, you have to know three ancient languages even before you begin; you have to know Hebrew, you have to know Aramaic, you have to know Yiddish. So I’ll tell you what. If. If you can learn enough beforehand, maybe if the miracle ever happens and we can send you to a yeshiva, you can go through faster than usual, rapid-advance, before the whole family goes bankrupt. If Rabbi Smallman, for example, gives you lessons.”

“He’ll do that,” he says excitedly. “He’s doing it already!”

“No, I’m not talking about just lessons. I’m talking about lessons. The kind you have to pay for. He’ll teach you one day after supper, and I’ll review with you the next day after supper. That way I’ll learn too, I won’t be such an ignoramus. You know what the Sages say about studying Talmud: ‘Get thee a comrade…’ You’ll be my comrade, and I’ll be your comrade, and Rabbi Smallman will be both our comrade. And we’ll explain to your mother, when she screams at us, that we’re getting a bargain, two for one, a special.”

So that’s what we did. To make the extra money, I started hauling cargo from the spaceport in my module—you notice it drives now as if it’s got a hernia? And I got Aaron David a part-time job down on the eighteenth level, in the boiler room. I figured if Hillel could almost freeze to death on that roof in order to become a scholar, it’s no tragedy if my son cooks himself a little bit for the same reason.

It works. My son learns and learns, he begins to have more the walk and talk of a scholar and less the walk and talk of a TV repairman. I learn too, not so much of course, but enough so that I can sweeten my conversation with lines from Ibn Ezra and Mendele Mocher Sforim. I’m not any richer, I’m still a kasrilik , a schlemiel, but at least now I’m a bit of an educated schlemiel. And it works also for Rabbi Smallman: he’s able to send his family once a year on a vacation to Earth, where they can sit around a piece of lake and see what real water is like in the natural state. I’m happy for him, me and my herniated module. The only thing I’m not happy about is that I still can’t see any hope for yeshiva tuition money. But, listen, learning is still learning. As Freud says, just to see from Warsaw to Minsk, even if you don’t see right and you don’t understand what you see, it’s still a great thing.

But who, I ask you, can see from here to Rigel? And on the fourth planet, yet, they’ll come here and create such a commotion?

From the Neozionist movement, of course, we had already heard a long time ago. Jews always hear when other Jews are getting together to make trouble for them. We’d heard about Dr. Glickman’s book, we’d heard about his being killed by Vegan Dayanists, we’d heard about his followers organizing all over the galaxy—listen, we’d even had a collection box installed in our synagogue by some of his party people here on Venus: “In memory of the heroic Dr. Glickman, and to raise funds to buy back the Holy Land from the Vegan aliens.”

With that I have no particular quarrel; I’ve even dropped a couple of coins myself in the pushke from time to time. After all, why shouldn’t Milchik the TV man, out of his great wealth, help to buy back the Holy Land?

But the Neozionist movement is another matter. I’m not a coward, and show me a real emergency, I’m ready to die for my people. Outside of an emergency —well, we Jews on Venus have learned to keep the tips of our noses carefully under the surface of our burrows. It’s not that there’s anti-Semitism on Venus—who would ever dream of saying such a thing? When the Viceroy announces five times a week that the reason Venus has an unfavorable balance of trade with other planets is that the Jews are importing too much kosher food: that’s not anti-Semitism, that’s pure economic analysis. And when his Minister of the Interior sets up a quota for the number of Jews, in each burrow and says you can only move from one place to another if you have special permission: that also is not anti-Semitism, obviously, it’s efficient administration. What I say is, why upset a government so friendly to the Jews?

There’s another thing I don’t like about Neozionism; and it’s hard to say it out loud, especially to a stranger. This business about going back to Israel. Where else does a Jew belong but in that particular land? Right? Well, I don’t know, maybe. We started out there with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. No good. So the first time we came back was with Moses, and that lasted for a while—until the Babylonians threw us out. Then we came back under Zerubbabel, and we stayed there for five hundred years—until Titus burned the Temple and the Romans made us leave again. Two thousand years of wandering around the world with nothing more to show for it than Maimonides and Spinoza, Marx and Einstein, Freud and Chagall, and we said, enough is enough, back to Israel. So back we went with Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann and the rest of them. For a couple of centuries we did all right, we only had to worry about forty million Arabs who wanted to kill us, but that’s not enough excitement for what God Himself, Blessed be His Name, called on Mount Sinai a “stiff-necked people.” We have to get into an argument—in the middle of the Interplanetary Crisis—with Brazil and Argentina.

My feeling, I don’t know about the rest of the Jews, but I’m getting tired. If no, is no. If out, is out. If good-bye, is good-bye.

That’s not the way the Neozionists see it. They feel we’ve had our rest. Time for another round. “Let the Third Exile end in our lifetimes. Let the Knesset be rebuilt in our age. Israel for the Jews!”

Good enough. Don’t we still say, after all the wine, “Next year in Jerusalem”? Who can argue? Except for the one small thing they overlooked, as you know: Israel and Jerusalem these days isn’t even for human beings. The Council of Eleven Nations Terrestrial wants no trouble with the Vegans over a sliver of land like Israel, not in these times with what’s going on in the galaxy: if both sides in the Vegan Civil War are going to claim the place as holy territory because the men they call the founders of their religions once walked in it, let the bivalves have it, says the Council, let them fight it out between themselves.

And I, Milchik the TV man, I for one see nothing strange in a bunch of Vegan bivalves basing their religion on the life and legend of a particular Jew like Moshe Dayan and wanting to chop up any other Jews who try to return to the land of their ancestors. In the first place, it’s happened to us before: to a Jew such an attitude should by now begin to make sense. Where is it written that a Dayanist should like Dayan’s relatives? In the second place, how many Jews protested fifty years ago when the other side, the Vegan Omayyads, claimed all human Mohammedans were guilty of sacrilege and expelled them from Jerusalem? Not, I’ll admit, that such a protest would have been as noticeable as a ripple in a saucer of tea….

Well, the First Interstellar Neozionist Conference is organized, and it’s supposed to meet in Basel, Switzerland, so that, I suppose, history can have a chance to repeat itself. And right away the Dayanist Vegans hear about it and they protest to the Council. Are Vegans honored guests of Earth, or aren’t they? Their religion is being mocked, they claim, and they even kill a few Jews to show how aggravated they are. Of course the Jews are accused of inciting a pogrom, and it’s announced that in the interests of law and order, not to mention peace and security, no Jewish entrance visas will be honored in spaceports anywhere on Earth. Fair is fair.