The Wicked Son Read online

  CONTENTS

  * * *

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Jewish Encounters: Jonathan Rosen, General Editor

  Jewish Encounters: Published and Forthcoming

  Foreword: The Four Sons of the Haggadah

  In or Out?

  The Other

  Hide in Plain Sight

  Jewish Anxiety

  A Hot Hen’s Kiss

  Treason

  You Can Just Be Nothing

  Sins of the Jews

  Lies, or Teshuva

  Primitive Secret Societies

  Superstition

  Bar Mitzvah and Golden Calf

  The Poor Shul

  A Rich Shul and a Poor Shul

  Happiness and Maturity

  Sadomasochistic Phenomena; or, the Two Chelms

  Ritual

  The Apikoros and Gun Control; or The Oslo Syndrome

  Racism

  Performance and Restraint

  Dead Jews and Live Jews

  De Clerambault’s Syndrome

  Moses and Monarchy

  Neurotics

  The Wicked Son

  Jacob and Esau

  Belonging

  Chesed/Gevurah

  What Israel Means to Me

  Well Poisoning

  Hooked-Nose Jews, or Let’s Make It Pretty

  The High School Car Wash

  Judaism: The House That Ruth Built

  Jewish, but Not Too Jewish

  Tribal Life

  Apikoros

  The Children of Kings and Queens

  Glossary

  About the Author

  Copyright

  THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO

  Meirav and Mordechai Finley

  JEWISH ENCOUNTERS

  * * *

  Jonathan Rosen, General Editor

  Jewish Encounters is a collaboration between Schocken and Nextbook, a project devoted to the promotion of Jewish literature, culture, and ideas.

  JEWISH ENCOUNTERS

  * * *

  PUBLISHED

  THE LIFE OF DAVID . Robert Pinsky

  MAIMONIDES . Sherwin B. Nuland

  BARNEY ROSS . Douglas Century

  BETRAYING SPINOZA . Rebecca Goldstein

  EMMA LAZARUS . Esther Schor

  THE WICKED SON . David Mamet

  FORTHCOMING

  MOSES . Stephen J. Dubner

  BIROBIJAN . Masha Gessen

  JUDAH MACCABE . Jeffrey Goldberg

  YEHUDA HA’LEVI . Hillel Halkin

  THE DAIRY RESTAURANT . Ben Katchor

  DISRAELI . Adam Kirsch

  THE JEWISH BODY . Melvin Konner

  THE SONG OF SONGS . Elena Lappin

  THE AMERICAN SONGBOOK . David Lehman

  ABRAHAM CAHAN . Seth Lipsky

  THE LUBAVITCHER REBBE . Jonathan Mahler

  GLÜCKEL OF HAMELN . Daphne Merkin

  THE ALTALENA . Michael B. Oren

  THE HEBREW ALPHABET . Ilan Stavans

  MARSHALL MEYER . Noga Tarnopolsky

  MESSIANISM . Leon Wieseltier

  MARC CHAGALL . Jonathan Wilson

  JEWS AND POWER . Ruth R. Wisse

  FOREWORD

  * * *

  The Four Sons of the Haggadah

  The rebbe was plagued by mice. The mice were eating his books, and nothing could dissuade them.

  He searched in vain for a deterrent.

  Until, reading the Shulkhan Arukh, he came across the statutes governing Passover.

  The Shulkhan Arukh unequivocally states that nothing may be eaten after the afikomen.

  So the rebbe crumpled the afikomen and sprinkled the crumbs over his books.

  But the mice were smarter than the rebbe; first they ate the Shulkhan Arukh, then they ate the afikomen, and then they ate his books.

  —As told by RABBI LAWRENCE KUSHNER

  In the section of the Passover Haggadah called “The Four Sons,” we find “What are the laws, the ordinances and the rulings which Hashem has commanded us?”

  The answer being, “You should inform this child of all the laws of Pesach, including the ruling that nothing should be eaten after the afikomen.”

  Passover Haggadah, the Feast of Freedom, the Rabbinical Assembly.

  The wise child asks for information, and, in my Haggadah, he receives information, humor, which is to say, welcome to his tradition. His desire to learn and participate is rewarded with love—the other sons present their requests as if information were going to cure them of their anomie. Estrangement, hurt, rancor, alienation from the world, can, in the other-than-wise, be misinterpreted as, and assigned to, a failure of their tradition.

  The second of the four sons, the wicked child, asks “What does this ritual mean to you?”

  He is wicked in that his question is rhetorical—it is not even a request for information; it is an assault.

  The wicked Jewish child removes himself from his tradition, and sets up as a rationalist and judge of those who would study, learn, and belong. Here is a joke for him.

  The Minsker apikoros met the Pinsker apikoros. “I challenge your claim to preeminence,” said the Minsker; “defend your excellence as an apikoros.

  “I’m not sure I believe in God,” said the Pinkser.

  “I’m not sure I believe in God,” replied the Minsker. “And I eat pork, I work on Shabbos, and I never go to shul.”

  “You aren’t an apikoros,” said the Pinsker. “You’re a goy.”

  The third son is the simple son, who asks simply, “Ma Hu?” or “What is this?”

  We are told to tell him, “It is with a mighty hand that Hashem took us out of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.”

  A borscht belt joke: Why did the Jews wander forty years in the desert? Because they wouldn’t ask directions.

  This is good, accurate ethnic humor; but it is not true that the Jews wandered forty years. They spent five weeks journeying between the Sea of Reeds and the Jordan River. Where Moses sent out the scouts. The scouts returned and said that the giants inhabited the land, that the scouts looked to themselves as grasshoppers and that they felt that so they must seem in the eyes of the giants.

  Rabbi Finley teaches that this sin, of lack of faith, this inability to change, kept the Israelites in the desert, until God saw that the generation of the desert had died off, that time had killed the sin of acceptance of Slavery.

  A new generation had been born that had never seen Egypt, and these people were educable and simple enough to ask, “What is this?”

  The fourth child is he who does not know how to ask. For him, one is supposed to open the discussion.

  To the wicked son, who asks, “What does all this mean to you?” To the Jews who, in the sixties, envied the Black Power Movement; who, in the nineties, envied the Palestinians; who weep at Exodus but jeer at the Israel Defense Forces; who nod when Tevye praises tradition but fidget through the seder; who might take their curiosity to a dogfight, to a bordello or an opium den but find ludicrous the notion of a visit to the synagogue; whose favorite Jew is Anne Frank and whose second-favorite does not exist; who are humble in their desire to learn about Kwanzaa and proud of their ignorance of Tu Bi’Shvat; who dread endogamy more than incest; who bow the head reverently at a baptism and have never attended a bris—to you, who find your religion and race repulsive, your ignorance of your history a satisfaction, here is a book from your brother.

  * * *

  In or Out?

  The Jewish religion was admirably suited for defence, but it was never designed for conquest; and it seems probable that the number of proselytes was never much superior to that of apostates.

  Yet even in their alien state, the Jews, still asserting their lofty and exclusive privileges, shu
nned, instead of courting, the society of strangers. They still insisted, with inflexible rigor, on those parts of the law which it was in their power to practice. Their peculiar distinction of days, of meats, and of a variety of trivial though burdensome observances, were so many objects of disgust and aversion for the other nations, to whose habits and prejudices they were diametrically opposite…under these circumstances, Christianity offered itself to the world, armed with the strength of Mosaic law, and delivered from the weight of its fetters.

  —EDWARD GIBBON,

  The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter 15

  As you have taken the time to read and I to write this book, I believe we should be frank: The world hates the Jews. The world has always and will continue to do so.

  “Why?” is the question of the nonaffiliated, for to ask the question, is, in effect, to suggest there is an answer worthy of consideration. One does not ask of the school bomber, “What does he have against small children?” of Hirohito, “What did he have against Pearl Harbor?” Neither did the victims of apartheid or Jim Crow attempt to understand their persecutors. Neither does the contemporary gay or lesbian attempt to “understand” the unreasoning hatred that he or she suffers and that expresses itself as right reason.

  The effort to combat psychotic prejudice with reasonable counterarguments is not only an act of folly but a capitulation. (cf. The old saw “A woman who consents to listen consents.”) We might say the world hates the unknown, the hermetic, the odd; we might say that Christianity and Islam, deriving from the mother religion, must indict that heritage too strict a toleration of which would gainsay their foundation doctrines; we might say that it is convenient to have an always-indictable Other upon whom one may project uncomfortable impulses, to have a race conveniently identified as savage, whose property, thus, may be appropriated at leisure—the Jew as “Mama’s Bank Account.” In this novella, filmed as I Remember Mama, Mama stills her family’s fear of poverty by reference to their safety net—Mama’s bank account—which is revealed at the story’s end to be nonexistent. But, finally, there are but two options: to avow or to discount the notion that the world hates the Jews. The observant must, we know, endorse the first.

  There now are two dependent options: that this hatred is reasonable or unreasonable.

  To elect the first, even with satistying fiats or limits, is race prejudice. Would you say, reader, of African-Americans, Native Americans, Mexicans, or of any race, “We must, of course, in good conscience, admit, entre nous, that there are aspects of their race and rite that are unfortunate?” Of course not, and you may not, then, in consistency, if not in conscience, say it of the Jews. This leaves the second option—that this hatred is unreasonable.

  In accepting this unfortunate but accurate assessment, one may indict and/or attempt to change the world. But one cannot reason a lunatic, or a congeries of the same, out of their delusion, for the delusion is the absence of reason. One may, then, accept that this persecution is inevitable and constant (now waxing, now waning, but inevitable) and decide how one will deal with it. One may side with oppressors or side with the oppressed.

  “Yes, but, yes, but, yes, but,” you may exclaim and attempt to revert to a previously discounted proposition, that there is something unhealthy, unnice—choose your term—meaning “provocative,” about the Jews. That, in sum, we “bring it on ourselves.” By which reversion you are safely reassumed into blind folly, and thus, self-exempted from the work of either perception or action.

  The attraction of flight, as Jonah from Ninevah, as Abraham from the imminence of God’s pronouncements, is the burden of the Jews. It is not that we, uniquely, have been given the burden but that we, uniquely, have been ordered to resist.

  Yes, the world hates you.

  It may intermittently award the Jew the mantle of pseudo human being, (cf. Albert Einstein, and the State of Israel, 1948–1953), but the observant will find the very exercise of this dubious prerogative an example of race superiority.

  The world hates the Jews.

  You have been taxed, as the African-American was not, with the ability to “pass” or better, with the illusion that you can do so. To avail yourself of the same is to be in a position similar to a homosexual in the church or in the army: the majority culture has “allowed” you a provisional membership, provided that you never pursue your proclivities. (Note also that, like the homosexual under “don’t ask, don’t tell,” your very nature has been indicted as loathsome, and that which presents itself as an indulgence is, thus, a vicious expression of loathing.)

  The world hates the Jews. The everyday announcements of the so-called “cycle of violence” in Israel are race slander, a pro forma reminder of the availability of the Jews as an object of disgust. They are, in this, like those Victorian novels, each of which featured a stock Jew—there hook-nosed and greasy, here intent on theft and murder. The indictments of Israel, in her life-and-death struggle, are unanswerable, as they are based upon a false assumption: that the uninvolved are somehow impartial.

  “Can so many non-Jews be wrong?” you ask, and I would suggest that you consider the Shoah, the rape victim, the schoolchildren killed at Columbine. Is it reasonable to ask of the victims of Columbine, “What did they and their parents do to bring it about?”

  Then you may not ask it of the Israeli bombing victims, and of their race and nation.

  The world hates the Jews.

  In or out.

  * * *

  The Other

  I was scandalized at the Sabbath in Sahariya…after three months in Jerusalem it was quite a sight; cafés open, singers in clubs, people in general amusing themselves…such a godless town! I guess it is that Jerusalem is a particularly Holy place…the peace and quiet that comes over Jerusalem at sundown on Friday night is like snow falling gently in Virginia.

  —MARY CLAWSON, Letters from Jerusalem

  Mary Clawson’s Letters from Jerusalem is a remarkable book. Clawson was a Christian woman, the wife of an agriculturist in the U.S. Foreign Service. He was posted to Jerusalem, and the book is a compilation of her letters home between 1952 and 1954.

  She writes of her love for the Jew, of our national courage, humor, solidarity, invention, and hardiness. She comes to Israel and to the Jewish people curiously unprejudiced and finds us both admirable and human—two qualities today’s Western world is hardpressed to discover in the Jews, or in our lightning rod, the Jewish State.

  Rabbi Kushner taught that the miracle of the burning bush was not that it was not consumed but that Moses watched it long enough to perceive that it was not consumed.

  It must be true of all races, and I know it is true of mine, that its true excellences may not be immediately apparent to the prejudiced, indeed, to the merely uninvolved. Racial traits, observances, and philosophy may be understood as “bad,” or merely obstinate. These quick, prejudiced opinions are destructive of justice; the enlightened have long recognized the error of ascribing a noxious trait or action of an individual to his race. Unfortunately, it requires further self-scrutiny to recognize that any observable and actual actions of any individual of any race are easy to misunderstand, or mischaracterize, and that the human capacity for xenophobia is vast and we are usually eager to label the other as savage. (The designation “charming” is merely an application of the epithet of savagery to that group by which one does not currently feel threatened.)

  The resourceful and quaint little Annamese became the Gooks, as Hans und Fritz of the Edwardian vaudeville became the hated Hun, as Tevye the Milkman became, once again, the bloodthirsty, insatiable “Jew,” fiend of the Middle East.

  The most enlightened of intellects are not protected from the virus of ethnocentrism, merely substituting “it is plain” for the “everybody knows” of the less educated. Contemporary fashionable sentiment in the West denigrates the Jewish State and, thus, consciously or not, the Jew. This is but a regression to the mean, a world correction of the anomaly of twenty or thirty
years of post-Shoah sympathy, after 2,000 years of persecution at the hands of the Christian West.

  The historic endorsement of and, indeed, demand for persecution of those whose religion preceded the Gospels is now, perhaps unconsciously but nonetheless reified in the Christian West by fear of a jihadist Arabia. The Arab’s anti-Semitism is an internecine feud, waxing and waning over millenia. The Arab military humiliation at the hands of Israel, cross-grafted with Christian doctrinal Jew-hatred has been treated magnificently by Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis (notably in his books What Went Wrong and Semites and Anti-Semites.)

  These Christian and Moslem doctrinal prejudices and geopolitical grievances are joined and, unfortunately in the minds of some, ratified by what would otherwise (absent the global oil situation) be understood as a pitiable if vocal minority: apostate Jews whose denunciation of Israel rises past legitimate debate into the realm of race treason. Such are treasonous not in disagreement with contemporary Israeli policies (such disagreement is a salient fact of life in Israel, as abroad), but in the designation, by the apostate, of his coreligionists, his racial brothers, as the Other.

  The apostate feels himself superior to that Other which is his race and clan, and glories in his profession of exile. Eric Hoffer wrote in the sixties of the tendency of the self-aggrandizing to turn on their own group, seeking notoriety and endorsement for their magnificent detachment. Such “fair-mindedness” contains a refusal to recognize, in their brothers and sisters, the anguish of their situation and the imperfection of their solutions as they engage in a literal battle for their lives.

  This inability to assign to the Israelis a basic humanity is, to me, more deeply disturbing than the reluctance to endorse or accept any of their national positions. The happy assignment of wicked motives to the Israeli soldier, command, and populace is, to me, more deeply troubling than the fraudulent misreportage of actual acts as savage.