The Wicked Son Read online

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  Primitive Secret Societies

  Tribal societies arouse the universal sentiments of curiosity, fear, and awe; they surround themselves with that veil of mystery so attractive to primitive minds the world over; and they appeal with ever growing power to the social and convivial aspects of human nature, to feelings of prestige and exclusiveness, and to the consciousness of the very material privileges connected with membership…. By the side of the family and the tribe they provide another organization which possesses still greater power and cohesion. In their developed form they constitute the most interesting and characteristic of primitive social institutions.

  In communities destitute of wider social connections, such societies help to bring about a certain consciousness of fellowship and may often, by their ramifications throughout different tribes, become of much political importance…. Among the Korannas of South Africa, a fraternity exists whose initiates are marked by three cuts on the chest. Said one of their members to an inquirer: “I can go through all the valleys inhabited by Korannas and by Griquas, and wherever I go, when I open my coat and show these three cuts, I am sure to be well received.” After a Nkimba novice has acquired the secret language and has become a full member, he is called Mbwamvu anjata, and the members in the other districts “hail him as a brother, help in his business, give him hospitality, and converse freely with him in the mystic language.”

  —HUTTON WEBSTER, Primitive Secret Societies

  What if, then, the Jews were a secret society, similar in the public imagination to the Rosicrucians, the Knights Templar, the Masons, and so on?

  What if admission to this secret society depended upon a profession of faith—note that that faith here must be, to a certain extent, blind—for the true benefits of membership in a secret society must be apparent only to the initiated members. So the first step for admission is faith and a protestation of faith. The next step would be, as with any secret society, a study toward mastery of its rituals and language. These, of course, would have a deeper meaning to the acolyte who believed and understood and wished to work toward self-perfection in the craft than they would to the merely curious.

  The craft here, the secret society, is Judaism; the first steps of initiation, as with the Masons, would be in study of ritual and special-case language.

  The first language and practice would be that of the prayer service. The language would be prayer-book Hebrew, the language of the Torah. A mastery of the same might reveal, to the novice, further avenues of study.

  We note that since Judaism is not hierarchical, the acolyte, the novice, and the initiate must determine for himself, must design for himself, further stages of initiation. Having mastered sufficient biblical Hebrew, the devotee of this secret world might be inspired to pursue those advanced texts and those systems that devolved from it. He might study Aramaic in order to read the Talmud; these studies might lead toward the Kabbalah and the mystical tradition, toward responsa and the rabbinic, ethical tradition; such studies might, then, involve the study of medieval and modern Hebrew.

  His zeal for further progress in this nonhierarchal secret society, Judaism, might lead to the study of Yiddish and the sociology of one thousand years of European diaspora civilization. These studies, whether of years or decades, might confirm in the student an awe of the civilization that gave him life, and a deep longing for further knowledge. He might even conclude that beyond the specific studies, of language, culture, ritual, and philosophy, lies a mystery that opens out before him the more he participates in it, the more he devotes himself to it.

  Most secret societies have, at their core, the final mystery of “the secret knowledge,” which is that there is no secret knowledge. Judaism, as a spiritual, ethical, or social practice, has at its core a mystery so deep that not only is its existence hidden from the uninitiated but its very practitioners are hated and scorned, reviled and murdered as necromancers. What is the fear the Jew engenders and that manifests itself as hatred? Perhaps it is caused by his historical, absolute, terrifying certainty that there is a God.

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  Superstition

  Bernard Rust, the Prussian Minister of Culture, once explained in a nation-wide radio broadcast that Palestine was the crossroads of the ancient world. That here the black race of Africa, the white race of Europe, and the yellow race of Asia met and mingled to form a mongrel folk, the Jews. This gave the Jewish nation a sense of maladjustment, arising from their racial impurity. To explain this racial maladjustment, the Jewish religion with its conception of Original Sin was developed.

  —DOUGLAS MILLER, You Can’t Do Business with Hitler (1941)

  Each human being has a certain amount of awe that must be discharged. It can be discharged only through ritual. If he does not engage in existing religious ritual, the individual will seek out or invent other avenues for his submission to powers greater than himself. These rituals include political conventions, sports rooting, and celebrity worship.

  When the individual’s awe has already been cathected in the pagan (see earlier discussion), the abstract relationship of awe to religion (which is to say, to the mystery of a prime mover) may be correspondingly disparaged.

  This is the situation in which the apostate Jew finds himself. He may worship wealth, fame, status, sex, physical fitness, good works, or the notion of human perfectibility, but the already-discharged awe is now unavailable to its original progenitor, and the religious urge may thus be easily overlooked or, indeed, despised.

  Satan becomes abortion doctors or abortion clinics, the Evil Empire, the Christian Right, the Bush administration, godless liberals. Here the human (unacceptable thought or behavior) has been confused with the supernatural (evil incarnate).

  Good may now similarly be reduced from the ideal of a perfectly moral life to the very human achievement of those goals, the nonreligious human, in his independence, cares to name as paramount: a billion dollars, a magazine cover, etc.; and the desire for godless goals culminates, in its perfection, in the desire to be omnipotent—godlike, outside of history, outside cause and effect. (For if one might, just possibly, possess one billion dollars, might one not, theoretically, possess one hundred billion dollars and, so, rule the world?)

  The urge to wealth may stand in for omnipotence, the urge to fame and endless youth for immortality.

  In substituting conveniently elected totems and ceremonies for their more ancient counterparts, we have become neither more rational nor more humane, merely more confused—we have replaced awe by superstition. The ceremony of circumcision is derided as savage self-mutilation, that of breast augmentation accepted as logical fulfillment of healthy individual prerogative. Plastic surgery performed in aid of self-or community propitiation is simple cosmetic alternative; that performed in aid of religion is viewed, by the enlightened, as monstrous.

  But every obeisance, performance, or sacrifice the apostate finds irrational or ludicrous in religion will be found, under another name, in his daily life. The apostate might balk at consulting a rabbi as he might a soothsayer, but finds it logical to consult with a “life coach.” He may scoff at the notion of evil spirits, or evil inclination, but participates with a therapist in an ongoing ceremony centered in the belief that constant attendance and a ritual recitation of his wrongs will (in some unnameable, never-to-be-tested way) stave off some unnameable catastrophe (the sequel to that previous unfortunate occurrence that an unaffected individual might identify as “his own life”).

  The enlightened might find ludicrous the notion of a Magic Balm of Youth, yet pay outrageous sums for an inert white cream that has been suggested to reverse the aging process. One might identify as primitive the caste differences between Cohen, Levi, and Israel yet pay exorbitantly to “move up” from one model car to the next—models operationally identical, and differing only in the placement and shape of their fenders and badging.

  Man is a constantly, irremediably, deeply superstitious creature—no man more than
he who is assured of his absolute rationality. He may throw salt over his shoulder, knock on wood, wear the lucky golf glove, apply the cologne used only when dating, and yet feel the intellectual superior of the poor soul who goes to shul. The apostate is not an agnostic but an unconscious polytheist. Jewish monotheism is, first of all, the intent to “give it a name”—to call to the individual’s attention the fact that he is constantly worshipping something and to ask him to consider of what his particular practice is made.

  Modern life, the Shoah, the destruction of European Jewry and its traditions have vitiated the true demand of religion. The task of reform—to eliminate the taxing, to make a stringent practice of accommodation—has neared completion, but the nagging question, the essential question, the question that can be put and answered only through ritual, though less often asked, remains. It is this: instead of worshipping the wind and the water, fortune and fame, do you have the courage to stand in awe of that which gave rise to them, to you, and to your human urges?

  The obscenely wealthy seek more wealth, the world-famous more fame, the powerful ultimate power, the beautiful endless youth. Whom do we see that is immune?

  The thoughtful Jew might use the gift of reason, acknowledge his fears, and seek conviction. The act will not be unrewarded.

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  Bar Mitzvah and Golden Calf

  The bar mitzvah ceremony, undertaken at age thirteen, is a survival of the puberty ordeal found in every primitive society. In the Temple Period the Jews developed from a nomadic tribe. In the Rabbinic Period a rejection of the primitive desert ordeal (the sacrifice; cf. the akedah) became an avowal of and an endorsement of rabbinic Judaism: animal sacrifice, which had replaced human sacrifice, was itself rejected. Now the child was consecrated thus: he came before the group to read from the Torah, to explicate and expound on the meaning of the text. He endorsed, by his accomplishment, not the sacrifice of wanderer-warrior-gatherer first demanded in the desert puberty ritual but the religious intellectual life necessary to the continuation of the stateless tribe in exile.

  In the diaspora, in late-twentieth-century America, the meaning and the purpose of the bar mitzvah changed again. Reform Judaism had either stressed or been unfortunately taken to have endorsed the needlessness (if not the harmfulness) of ritual.

  As the general level of learning of the congregants declined, the reading from the Torah itself obtained something of an echo of the original nature of ordeal: the event was understood to celebrate not the boy’s matriculation into the tribe but his final (perhaps sole) obligation to it—Bar Mitzvah became a celebration of release.

  Unschooled, confused, and shamefaced, the child acted out for his elders not their requirements for his preparation for manhood but their fantasy of manumission. The lad’s shamefaced bar mitzvah ratified his elders’ assertion that Judaism was dead.

  Should any resemblance to the golden calf be lacking, we may note that, starting after the War, the American bar mitzvah became a byword for conspicuous and bizarre consumption—a celebration of the wealth of the participants. One might decry the degradation of this ceremony as a unique form of corruption, were it not that it, far from being unique, is the type of most stories in the Torah.

  An examination of the bar mitzvah’s degradation—and its similarity to the story of the golden calf—may reveal something of not only the nature but also the purpose of the Torah, and of its true importance to the Jews. The Torah is, among other things, a poetic and philosophic treatment of the trauma of the clan in transition from the primitive to the civilized. The immemorial legends of the desert tribe are here assembled and redacted in the light of an overriding concept: a new inspiration has been introduced (it may be called God, or monotheism), and so everything must change. Old ways will, of course, persist. Some must be discarded, some must be altered, some must be reunderstood.

  This change is recorded as the inspiration of Abraham and the struggles of his descendants, culminating in and signified by Moses. The primitive desert clan of idol worshippers becomes the sumptuous city of Pharaoh—civilization has progressed from one discrete state to another, from the nomadic to the settled—and it is time for the clan, the Jews, to make an accommodation with the trauma.

  This is to say, there will be no new information—the new thing, civilization, literacy, agriculture, has transpired, and the clan has two and only two choices: it may accept this civilization unthinkingly (and, indeed, be greatly, materially rewarded for doing so, as Moses is by Pharaoh), or, it may retain something of the desert ways, and wisdom, and accept the constant burden of a gap between its desires and its perceptions.

  The primitive man lived in an animist state. He perceived the work of the gods all around him, and in every thing. Sociologists may have called this superstition, but it was religion. It was a direct and constant connection to the Divine, and it is understood by every human being who has ever lived in extended, direct contact with the elements.

  The transition from a hunter-gatherer society to agriculture and civilization destroyed an ancient connection to the gods. Under a roof and in a city, the urge to propitiate, to fear, the Powers became the urge to fear the king; fealty (and, later, patriotism) replaced clan loyalty.

  The universal human urges and transitions still remained, but they were dealt with by law rather than by custom, thus their origins were forgotten. Morality, which is a reliance on conscience, replaced awe, which is the fear of God; and law, which is an attempt to instill fear of consequences, replaced morality.

  As we progressed from the desert, from the immediate connection to awe, fear, lust, greed, anger (and their immediate consequences), we became, like the snake, subtle. Civilized life required and requires a great deal of self-delusion. We became rationalizing beings, as individuals and as a society, and learned to deny not only the existence of God but also the existence of the world, its progressions and necessities, and of human nature (or, say, the human soul).

  Uncathected longings, wonder, awe, and hope are suppressed today just as at the foot of Mount Sinai, by application of the heaviest metal in the world, gold. So the golden calf, and the million-dollar bar mitzvah are an expression of the same human longing: “I cannot control the gods, I must submit,” becomes “I cannot control the gods, the gods do not exist. What is all-powerful? Man. How may I control man? Through gold: I will worship gold.”

  The Torah, and, so, the Jews, have infuriated both the non-Jews and Jewish apostates for two thousand years because it and they, in their devotion, present proof of the possibility of a countervailing force to the inevitable social decay of man.

  The Torah may be seen, and its persistent worship understood as (inter alia) a memo to humankind. “Memo: civilization, in leaving the desert and progressing from the wandering tribe, will grow. Here is a mystery: Growth is identical to decay. Each supposed advance of humankind will and must involve an abandonment of older ways and practices that linked us directly to the Divine. This is inevitable. Just as the one-child family changes forever on the birth of the second child, the world will change with each additional member. Larger groups will require different social structures; different economic conditions and invention will further remove the individual from the practices of a life lived directly in nature.

  “This process is not to be decried (it is inevitable), but neither is it to be worshipped. Keep the nature of this process before your eyes, and you may retain a connection to that same God that was known to you in the desert.”

  The Torah is a record of struggle—Abraham’s struggle with his idol-maker father, Jacob with the angel, Moses with Korah. The bulk of the text is a poetic record of bizarre, unfortunate, wondrous, and deplorable strife. These stories may be understood as the inner conflict of the human being, his good against his bad, and the Torah as the struggle of the group (the Jews) to discover, refine, and preserve in action a connection to God.

  The end of the Chumash is the removal of the intermediary Moses, who stood between th
e Jews and God. Moses was a faithful but reluctant servant. He was chosen by God and pleaded other priorities. God pressed Moses into service, and Moses struggled, not only against himself, but against the Jews, who, now as then, being human, were difficult.

  The apostate, the rebellious, the apikoros, the wicked son, it may be said, is that individual to whom the Torah is addressed, who is both its subject and its intended recipient. The Jews are that race who, now accepting, now dismissing it, have been saddled with a document precisely and irrefutably addressing their apostasy.

  “Jewish guilt,” “Jewish self-loathing,” “Jewish anti-Zionism” all bear, as part of their title and their content, “Jewish.”

  The scoffing “ex”-Jew and the lavish “theme” bar mitzvah were not only foretold in, but are the sole subject of, the Torah.

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  The Poor Shul

  I should like to see any power of the world destroy this race, this small tribe of unimportant people whose wars have all been fought and lost, whose structures have crumbled, literature is unread, music is unheard, and prayers are no more answered.

  Go ahead destroy that race, destroy Armenia, see if you can do it, send them to the desert without bread or water, burn their homes and churches, then see if they will not last, sing and pray again.

  For when two of them meet anywhere in the world, see if they will not create a new Armenia.