Joshua Ferris - To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

He was preternaturally still on that stool, which begged to be swiveled at least a little.

“Do you know who is?”

“Specifically?”

“It must be someone,” he said. “Do you have a name or something else to go by?”

It was probably whoever I was emailing with, I thought. But that person’s name was my own, and I didn’t want to tell Stuart that, and hoped Connie hadn’t.

“No,” I said. “It just… happened. First the website, then Facebook, then everything on Twitter.”

“Connie also mentioned that you seem… maybe a little persuaded by some of what’s being said.”

“Me?”

“Suggestions that the Amalekites survived and underwent a transformation.”

“I am an avowed atheist,” I said.

“Right,” he said. “But any opinion you might have about God would not necessarily be brought to bear on the question of the existence of a people like this. Do you know who the Amalekites are?”

“Sort of,” I said. “Not really.”

“When we invoke the name Amalek today,” he said, “we are invoking not just the ancient enemy of the Jews but an eternally irreconcilable enemy. Anti-Semitism in whatever form or manifestation that happens to take. Defaced synagogues. Suicide bombs. Hate speech. You might compare them to the Nazis. Amalek was the very first Nazi,” he said.

He took out a handkerchief and blew his nose, then returned the handkerchief to his pocket. I have always admired a man who can blow his nose gracefully while another man looks on.

“Amalek lives today in the radicals and the fundamentalists. He also has a more metaphorical meaning. Amalek can be temptation. It can be apostasy. It can be doubt.”

“Doubt?”

“I hope that doesn’t offend you,” he said. “I don’t think you hate the Jews like an Amalek just because you doubt God.”

“I don’t hate the Jews at all,” I said.

“It never occurred to me that you did,” he assured me.

“So you know it’s not me writing those things?”

“If you say it isn’t, I believe you.”

“It isn’t.”

“But what’s being written in your name remains upsetting to me and to others,” he said.

He removed his me-machine and in the silence that followed called up my Twitter account. Without a word, he passed the phone to me.

The Jew’s problem is that his suffering has made him double down on an absent God

The Jew refuses the enlightenment of doubt because without God his suffering would be meaningless

I gave the phone back.

“Stuart, I find those remarks abhorrent.”

“But you are an atheist,” he said. “You must agree with their substance.”

“No, I find them abhorrent.”

“Why?”

“The Jew this, the Jew that,” I said. “I’m not even Jewish, and it makes me cringe.”

“Well,” he said, “somebody has made those remarks.”

“I don’t know who,” I said.

“Do you believe you descend from these people?”

“No,” I said, “no, of course not, it’s… no, it’s unlikely.”

“Do you remember when you came to see me at my office?” he asked.

I hesitated. I wondered if Connie was listening. I was sure she was. The incomplete dental walls invited it. Mrs. Convoy was probably standing right next to her.

“I do,” I said in a very low voice.

“When you asked about Ezra?”

I nodded. I never wanted Connie to know about my visit to Stuart’s office to discuss how I might be more like Ezzie. I mean, on a formal basis: a practicing, atheistic Jew. Nothing came of it except a little embarrassment on my part, a little shame at my grotesque misapprehension of the most basic ways of Judaism and the world more broadly. What made me think I could emulate Ezzie? I had apologized to Stuart for any offense I might have caused and quickly left. Then for months and months afterward I lay in bed at night, and just as I was about to fall asleep, I’d recall this misbegotten inquiry and Stuart’s patient suffering of it, and my heart would jump and I would rise with a shock, incinerating with horror and shame.

“You had learned a few things about Judaism by that time,” he said. “Do you remember what a mitzvah is?”

Suddenly I felt like we were back at Connie’s sister’s wedding, at that deserted table in the dimness as the music faded, when he asked me if I knew what a philo-Semite was. After that, I never again wanted anyone who knew more about Judaism than I did to ask me basic questions about Judaism.

“I think so,” I said, “but can I be honest with you, Uncle Stuart?”

Uncle Stuart! It just came out! And there was nothing I could do about it! I couldn’t retract it any more than I could retract “Time to take a stool sample.” And this time there was no way of saying it was just a joke. My face went hot. I stopped breathing. I wanted to weasel out of the room, but I waited, wondering if he would acknowledge it or take mercy on me and let it pass.

“Please,” he said. “Honesty is best.”

He took mercy on me. “Thank you, Stuart,” I said. “Sorry,” I said. “What were we talking about again?”

“A mitzvah,” he said.

“Oh, right. I think I know what that is, but I’m guessing you know better than I do.”

“A mitzvah is a law,” he said. “There are 613 mitzvot to follow in accordance with the Torah. We take them very seriously, you understand. Every one of them, every day. They are moral laws, but also divine commandments. And three of them,” he said, putting his thumb and two fingers in the air, “concern Amalek.”

His fingers remained in the air.

“Remember what Amalek did to you out of Egypt,” he said, touching his thumb. Touching his forefinger, he said, “Never forget the evil done to you by Amalek. And destroy the seed of Amalek,” he concluded, touching the final finger. “They sound harsh, which is why so many go to such lengths to soften them, to turn them into metaphors. But others believe we face a real enemy, an existential threat, in every generation. Every generation must recognize who Amalek is for that generation, and every generation must prepare to fight it any way it can. Now,” he said, “can you tell me who Grant Arthur is?”

“Who?”

“It’s a name Connie gave me. You don’t know it?”

“I’ve heard it a few times.”

He stood up from the stool and took a step toward me. He let a minute of silence pass between us while I was still cringing at having called him “Uncle.”

“Grant Arthur had his name changed to David Oded Goldberg in 1980,” he said.

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“The Internet,” he said. “How else? Now, do you know why he had his name changed?”

“I don’t really even know who he is,” I said.

He went on to tell me a few things about Grant Arthur. I shrugged. He looked away. When he looked back, he wore a modest, patient smile. The calm passage of air in and out of his nostrils was audible in a grave way. He extended his hand, and I took it. Then he thanked me and left the room.

“I know who you are now,” I wrote.

I have friends who figured it all out. Your name is Grant Arthur. You were born in New York in 1960. Your family had money. You moved to Los Angeles and changed your name to David Oded Goldberg in 1980. Not long after that, you were arrested for harassing an Orthodox Jewish rabbi named Osher Mendelsohn. Mendelsohn had taken out a restraining order against you. I want to know why. Why did you change your name? Why did a rabbi need protection against you?

That night I drove to a place in New Jersey called the Seehorse. I’d been there once or twice before. It was a windowless block structure on the outskirts of Newark. The cars washed by on the highway a hundred feet away, past a parking lot of broken glass and a garroted pay phone. Inside, the regulars stared up at a rotation of three seahorses: the fat one, the black one, and the one with tattoos. A one-armed DJ in a Hawaiian shirt and POW/MIA hat clapped the microphone against his chest at the end of every song. He encouraged everyone to tip. “These ladies aren’t dancing the cueca,” he said. “They have mouths to feed.” Terrific, I thought. Strippers with mouths to feed.