Joshua Ferris - To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“You have come to know quite a few rabbis,” said the rabbi.

“Yes, sir, I have.”

Rabbi Mendelsohn sat back in his chair. “I wonder if I can ask you just one more question.”

“Yes, sir, of course.”

“Do you believe in God?”

Never would it have occurred to Mirav to ask him that. He had transformed himself into a Jew. What for, if not God?

“No, sir, I do not,” he said.

“You don’t?” she said.

“You are an atheist,” said the rabbi, “is that correct?”

“Is that what Rabbi Youklus told you?”

“Youklus,” he said, “Blomberg, Rotblatt, Maddox, Repulski. None of them could recommend you to a Beth Din because you do not believe in God. If you did, you would be a Jew by now, and on your way to seminary.”

He was quiet. Through the long silence they stared at each other.

“How can you believe in God, sir,” he asked the rabbi, “knowing the history of your people as you do?”

“The history of my people is their struggle to keep God’s covenant,” said the rabbi. “Without Him, we are nothing.”

“God is what got you into this mess.”

“God is my every breath,” the older man said, losing the poise he had maintained throughout the conversation until, as Mirav put it thirty years later, Grant Arthur presumed to inform him that he was in a mess of some kind, and on account of God. He failed to collect himself. “You have no business in a synagogue,” the rabbi said, rising from the table, “and you make a mockery of the Torah.”

“I’m not the only nonbelieving Jew,” he said.

“You are no Jew at all,” said her father, “and never will be.”

Rabbi Mendelsohn turned and told his daughter that if she was not home within the hour, she would not be welcome in his house again.

“It was my first experience with someone who denied the existence of God,” she continued in the commons room, thirty years later, “and he had done so in the presence of my father. That was much more shocking — more violent — than if he’d reared back and punched the man. And I felt as you might expect me to feel if my father had come over to call me a slut and a whore — but worse. Much dirtier. Strange, isn’t it? I was deeply ashamed and scandalized and yet in love and hurt in some way, betrayed, and so I was very confused.”

“Did you go home that night?” asked Stuart.

“I did,” she said. “I looked at him differently when he admitted that he didn’t believe. There was an immediate estrangement. I’ve been married and divorced — I know from estrangement!” she said, laughing. “But with marriage, it takes time. With Grant it was instant. In my world, God was a fact of life, plain and simple. How could you be a good person and not believe in God?”

But the next day on lunch break, she found herself against all better judgment following her confusion back to its source. He answered the door in skullcap and beard — a Jew like any other but stripped now of some essential core, so that he looked costumed, a parody. She saw the clownish impiety her father must have seen when he stood where she was standing just the day before. Why was he wearing those clothes?

“Please come inside,” he said.

“I can’t.”

“Please,” he said. “Last night was the worst night of my life.”

“Why are you dressed like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like a Jew.”

“Mirav, please,” and he opened the door wide.

She felt like Jezebel entering the house of Satan, bound to be torn to pieces by dogs until only her hands and feet remained.

“I want to know why,” she said. “Why you pretend.”

“Is that what you think I’m doing, pretending?”

“What do you call it?”

“Devotion.”

“Devotion?” she said. “To what?”

“To you,” he said. “To your father. To the Jews.”

“But the Jews are the Jews because they are devoted to God.”

“The Jews are the Jews because they are devoted to the Jews,” he said.

“I think you’re confused,” she said.

“Mirav, do you have any idea how much more is required of me to be a Jew, how much more is demanded of me than of your father? How much more I must sacrifice—”

Instinct took over, and she pushed him. He fell back but steadied himself.

“He has Kiev,” he said, “and the birthright, and the upbringing.”

“And you have a Marc Chagall on your wall! You can have everything you want!”

“Not everything,” he said.

The first incident took place a few nights later, when he stood on the Mendelsohns’ front lawn and called out to the rabbi. “Rabbi Mendelsohn,” he said, “Rabbi Mendelsohn. Do I not follow the commandments as God demands? Do I not tithe? Do I not fast? Do I not celebrate the Revelation at Sinai? Have I not had myself circumcised for you? Learned Hebrew for you? Changed my name? Let my hair grow? Whether He is or is not, do I not make a good and righteous person in the eyes of God? Look out your window and tell me what you see. What of me is not a Jew?”

The rabbi called the police.

“Why do you deny me?” he continued. “What have I done? Do you love Judaism and want to protect it? You should be a Christian! Stand out here, Rabbi Mendelsohn, with me, with the Christian, and look in at the Jews. At the candles that light up the faces of your loved ones. At the verses that bind you together. At the fellowship that makes you Jews. Then you would love Judaism!”

Siren lights flickered down the street. He didn’t run. The police gave him a stern warning and told him not to return.

“Why do you study the Torah?” she asked. “Isn’t it just a waste of your time?”

“Do you think that without God, the Torah is without beauty? Do you think it’s without wisdom?”

“But God is everywhere in the Torah.”

“The goodness of the Jews is everywhere,” he said. “Their temptations, their folly, their humanity. Their intelligence, their compassion. Their struggle. Their charity. You don’t need God for those things.”

“But God is what inspires them.”

“The greatness of the Jews is what inspires them,” he said. “God only inspires fear.”

The next time he stood on the lawn, he asked Rabbi Mendelsohn to please forgive him for any rudeness. “But where is He now?” he asked, and his voice came clearly through the open windows. “Let Him strike me dead if my actions displease Him. If I am not a Jew, let Him strike me dead.” He paused. “Now why has He not struck me dead? Does it mean that I am a Jew? Or is He simply not there? Or is He standing by yet again while the Jews suffer another insult at the hands of a Gentile? How many insults do you endure before you turn your back on Him, Rabbi Mendelsohn? William of Norwich wasn’t enough? The Inquisition — that wasn’t enough? The pogroms, the gas chambers? Let Him strike me dead, Rabbi, if I do not hate the anti-Semite as much as you. Let Him strike me dead if I do not love you like a brother. Can’t you see why I love you, Rabbi? Or are you blind to it because you were born to it?”

This time he was gone when the police arrived. They told the rabbi they would go to the man’s house and have a talk with him. But if the rabbi really wanted to keep him away, they suggested he find a lawyer and seek a protective order.

“All your life you’ve been told to believe,” he said to her. “Your father’s a rabbi, a pious man. You go to services. You are given little lessons. You’re taught to fear Him, to love Him, to respect Him, to obey Him. It doesn’t surprise me that you look at me like a stranger, like you hate me.”

“I don’t hate you,” she said. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

“You come five minutes, ten minutes at most.”