The Wicked Son Read online

  —WILLIAM SAROYAN

  I met two wealthy Jews of my acquaintance who were visiting at a poor shul. It was Shabbos, and the rabbi was giving them the tour. The efficient cause of their inquiry was plain, as I encountered them in a classroom of fifth-graders.

  They had not come for the service but to inspect the facilities for their child to whom, to their credit, they wished to impart something of his heritage. But he was not going to have it imparted at this poor shul. Their fixed expressions told the tale of their fear, and their fear was that of contagion.

  The shul, again, was poor. It rented space from a Christian fundamentalist church near a freeway.

  Their faces showed they’d come to the very wrong place, and my hello their panic. The man, I saw, was afraid I’d engage him in some sort of conversation, thus extending the length, and, God forbid, the consequences of his very wrong decision.

  The shul, in his defense, had nothing to recommend it. Except that it was holy. And how could a casual, let alone a fearful, visitor recognize that?

  All sins, the rabbis tell us, are the sin of the spies, or the sin of the golden calf.

  The man had come to the shul because he had been told that it was extraordinary. To what did it owe its reputation? To the excellence of its rabbi. That’s why the prospect came. But he did not hear the rabbi, and he did not watch, let alone participate in, the service, and he left in fear.

  The Israelites, we are told, created the golden calf not because they doubted Moses and his connection with God but because they believed in it. The impending prospect of ultimate intimacy deprived them of their senses, and they reverted, forcefully and determinedly, to the limits of the known world—their act an insistence that nothing existed beyond their experience.

  For these Israelites, if a god existed, and if Moses had gone up the mountain to hear God’s command and to take it to the tribes—if this were true, those tribes would have to abandon most of the notions and behaviors that had ruled their lives and begin again with a new template. So they asserted, in an act of wish fulfillment, that it was not true, they did not believe in Moses or God, and proceeded to demonstrate their incredulity.*7 Their demonstration, then, the worship of the golden calf, was effectively a proof of their awe of God.

  As was the visitor’s flight from the poor shul. For, if the shul contained nothing but a congregation assembled to study the word of God—no marble, no gilding, just hard benches in a hot room—if this was sufficient, then, to the prospect, something was terribly wrong with his life. So, no, he concluded, it was not his life that was lacking, but the shul. How did I know?

  I knew because his reaction was not polite regret at being offered something he did not, on reflection, require; his reaction was not even disappointment but politely hidden disgust.

  The shul lacked even the most basic amenities—maintenance, let alone opulence—and the display of plaques commemorating donors. What was the message? That wealth, here, was pointless. Financial support might be welcomed, but wealth was not worshipped.

  What advantage, then, to this successful man? Only the possibility of communion with the Divine.

  See also, the bachelor who manages to find in every potential mate something just a little bit wrong. This person may be accused of, and may in fact grudgingly admit to, that malady called fear of commitment, but that may be more truthfully characterized as greed.

  The perennial bachelor is afraid not of commitment but of passing up any opportunity for unlicensed sex—he is afraid not of commitment but of restraint.

  The fellow shopping for a good shul may have continued his search and found that organization whose best claim was that it would make no claim on his spirit. One can imagine his gratitude and its expression in monetary donation. Which is why the great shul he visited was poor.

  * * *

  A Rich Shul and a Poor Shul

  Poverty becomes a Jew, like a red bridle a white horse.

  —Traditional

  The small, alternative storefront shul, or shteibl, attracts congregants through the power of the rabbi and the rabbi’s teaching. Should attendance outstrip capacity, or should the shul attract a bequest, it may trade cramped, Spartan quarters for more luxurious digs.

  Suppose it has grown prosperous enough to build its own facility. It will acquire, thus, a larger staff, both to maintain the results of and to increase the size of the endowment. Where once one dealt chiefly with the rabbi, congregants now will deal more frequently with the staff.

  As the bureaucracy solidifies (that is, as the congregation grows habituated to what are now seen as the legitimate rewards of prosperity), the rabbi has two choices: he or she may spend more time in administration, or “give the staff its head. In either case, the rabbi’s ability to perform the original task (instruction and spiritual care) ebbs. Increased time in administration means, of course, less time for pastoral duties; resignation of such administration to the staff will eventuate, of necessity, in the shul, taking a course of its own, different from that desired by its one-time captain, the rabbi.

  In the second instance, the rabbi may find his or her energies devoted not to direction but to correction of the above-indicated modifications. In either case, the rabbi’s strength must ebb.

  The shul may continue to prosper as the rabbi ages, but the rabbi must, of course, eventually weaken to the point of complete resignation, die, or retire. Now the staff may inherit a financially healthy system unencumbered by commitment to the actual, taxing practices of the clergy.

  The founder’s vision no longer exerts the drain upon its energies that was found so enervating in his or her final days, and the staff is free to devote itself to what may now be proclaimed as not only its true, but its sole, calling: administration. Having pride of place, the staff (along with its allies, the board) will be powerful in exerting direct or indirect influence in choosing the rabbi’s successor. (For the board, in its newfound freedom from the more rigorous demands of religion—study, contemplation, good deeds, etc.—must consider the will of the standing bureaucracy in its choice of a new rabbi. For the board, being made up of business people, recognizes that the shul may function, for a while, with an uncongenial rabbi, but will fail immediately without the staff.)

  The board and the bureaucracy, again, freed by the rabbi’s death, absence, or senescence, will choose, or steer the congregation toward, the innocuous—that is, toward an individual successful at, thus devoted to, those things at which the staff and the board excels, such as fund-raising, consensus, and public relations. With the installation of the new, the bureaucrats find themselves in complete power. The yetzer hara, so long maligned by the religious, has been freed and exercises itself under the name of “long-established sound business practices.”

  Devoted, now, solely to “growth,” the congregation grows. And its now-regnant bureaucrats must themselves acquire dependents. These are both the symbol of corporate success and, notionally, a shield or protection against the (real or potential) demands of the outer world (which is to say, the congregation) for those services once provided by the rabbi, such as teaching, counseling, and guidance. Now, should the actual rabbi still live, he or she may be offered an emeritus (powerless) position—useful to the corporation as a sop or distraction to any members of the once-poor shul who wonder at its degeneration. A large part of the work of this new infrastructure will be to identify this degeneration as “growth.” This blandishment will attract a new membership to the congregation, one interested in cleanliness, modernity, sound accounting principles, and, thus, repelled by the irrational (e.g., religion). The influx of new congregants will solidify the gains of the bureaucrats and suggest further growth. Now those dependents hired to support and isolate the forces of corporate responsibility will have served their apprenticeship. They will, naturally, long for advancement. They will turn their heads to gaze up the corporate ladder, and their avidity will not be unremarked. Factions will be formed, and a struggle must ensue, thus signal
ing the advent of a terminal bureaucracy—two opposed groups warring for possession of the husk that once housed a healthy organism. The shul, then, like the rabbi, has two choices: grow and die, or resist growth and die. Only in the latter, however, may be found the possibility of a continuation of the inspired rabbi’s teaching.

  * * *

  Happiness and Maturity

  The best I could come up with was that during my time in America I’d lived pretending to myself that the non-Jews didn’t really think I was a Christ-killing, world-dominating, media-controlling kike—pretending to myself that they really didn’t chide my Jewishness behind my back.

  —ALAN KAUFMAN, Matches

  Just as (in the view of the Christians) Christianity superseded Judaism; so the contemporary Jew may long to cast off that which he (consciously or unconsciously) understands as an outdated system of allegiance. This confused Jew may aspire to join in that which he understands as a more modern, non-Jewish confraternity, entry into which will more fully integrate him into society at large, thus bringing happiness.

  He is, here, twice deluded. First, the state of perfect, relaxed integration that he ascribes to the non-Jews, their absence of anomie and anxiety, is a fiction. (If the non-Jewish, that is, the majority view of society is less anxiety-provoking at all, it is in the majority’s freedom to look at the notion of the perfect state and recognize it as a fantasy.)

  Second, this integration the Jew supposes his Christian brothers enjoy—just beyond the borders of his own unfortunate (spiritual or racial) segregation—should it exist, the Jew would, in fact, be debarred from it because of his race. So we may find the apostate miming belief in a system or society whose imperfection is perfectly evident to all observant individuals who do not have a vested interest in fantasy.

  The apikoros is in love with a fiction that, if it existed, would exclude him. His delusion of freedom to choose sentences him to a life of disappointment. The cause of this disappointment is, as is normal in us all, identified as “someone else.” Psychiatry allows the individual to identify the cause of this unrest as one’s parents and the cause of bigotry as another race; Jewish self-loathing allows the practitioner to combine both.

  The happier individual, rather than investing in his own woes and casting about for their insoluble cause (a lapsed childhood, a genetic enormity), will turn his attention toward their solution. This individual, the apostate Jew, might say of his anomie, “I feel Jewish guilt,” “Jewish anxiety,” or “Otherness.” But these attributions lead toward no change and only guarantee his continued, worthless, self-awarded prerogative of recrimination. The moment the individual takes responsibility for his own state (which is to say, upon maturity), he must and will reinvestigate the belief system that previously had linked operationally associated misery with inaction.

  The question, then, might arise: why have I been investing in unhappiness and calling it “Jewishness”? It might occur to him that if Judaism, or “Jewishness,” is actually inert (as he sometimes holds), it is irrational for him, still, to be complaining about either its practices or its deficiencies. If, on the other hand, it is operational in his life, in what ways does his disdain differ from racial prejudice?

  * * *

  Sadomasochistic Phenomena; or, the Two Chelms

  [I]n masochistic perversion sexual satisfaction is arrived at by being humiliated, enslaved, or physically ill-treated;…in masochistic fantasies the imagination of similar situations leads to masturbation.

  —KAREN HORNEY, “Masochistic Phenomena” (1937)

  The masochistic and sadistic imagination engages in fantasies wherein the cryptosexual delight of unlimited power is experienced (equally and perhaps interchangeably) as victim and perpetrator.

  Holocaust films and slave epics are, essentially, these sexual fantasies. Their viewer is permitted, by the rectitude of the innocent sufferer’s cause, to engage in fantasies of submission, simultaneously enjoying fantasies of dominance.

  But it is all too possible for the participant to confuse the mythic-neurotic archetype with a real group coincidentally bearing the same name. We know that in Eastern Europe there were two Chelms: the one a repository of the world’s most ignorant creatures;*8 the other, an actual small town in Russia-Poland.

  There are, similarly, two Palestines and two Israels. And to many, the fantasy Palestinians: totally wronged, totally powerless, offers the masturbatory fantasy of a mythic race so put-upon that they are empowered, limitlessly, to kill.

  This fantasy, just as the fantasy of (as opposed to the actual) Holocaust, allows the devoted to indulge in the simultaneous sadism and masochism: the Palestinians are wronged and, so, empowered. They kill with suicide bombs and are, thus, unstoppable; their death, along with their murder, is endlessly sad, as they have been driven by their sufferings to the ultimate extremity.

  This engagement with the mythic (as opposed to the real) Palestinians allows—and, as Bernard Lewis has pointed out, is, in all too many cases, confected to allow—an otherwise permitted race-hatred: anti-Semitism.

  Anti-Semitism is a profoundly sexual fantasy—a sadomasochism founded on religious or pseudoreligious (e.g., Marxist or Nazi) views, which views are variously called “social” or “racial.” It is (consider the bizarre paraphernalia of the Nazis, the impossibly intricate illogic of the Holocaust denier) a fantasy capable of being worked out endlessly in everyday life: quite literally, a dream come true.

  It was, and is, as was the case with the American chattel slavery, a dream addending to faith and sexuality the inducement of financial gain: In America, free slave labor; in the Holocaust, Jewish possessions (indeed, down to the gold in the victims’ teeth, their hair, and meal made from their bones; and, today, the State of Israel.)*9 How can one understand this frenzy called reason?

  Only as dementia.

  The opposite of this hidden and less-hidden Jew-hatred is not philo-Semitism—this is and would be an equally false and degrading patronization. (Cf. “diversity” programs in American schools, calculated to “expose” the children of affluent whites to the somehow magically cleansing or educative capacities of what, if truth be told, they must hold to be those “noble savages,” those of darker-colored skin.) Philo-Semitism in the eyes of the world could be brought about (may God forbid) only by the destruction of the State of Israel, and the reemergence of the archetypal Jew as Victim.

  If the Jew is not a victim but merely a human being, the sadomasochistic fantasy of murder-and (self-) forgiveness cannot be played out and the obscene pornographic drama of anti-Semitism is stifled before the final, ejaculatory moment. The unwillingness of real Jews to die in cooperation with this sick, masturbatory fantasy of anti-Semitism further inflames the psychotic bigot as it brings his fantasy into relief. Here the Jew has offended not only in myth but in reality.

  Imagine the infantile thrill in saying there exists an iniquity so vast that one may, if one is its victim, perpetrate, indeed, delight in, the murder of schoolchildren, of families at prayer, of the elderly: an iniquity so vast that one may condone every instance of what (did the case not involve Jews) must be an “excess,” by bemoaning, not with resignation but with sympathy, the death of Palestinian children “forced,” not by their parents, but by their neighbors, to kill themselves)—the fantasist, again, thus coupling bloodlust to self-exoneration.

  There were two Chelms, and there are two Middle Easts. The true Middle East is involved, as it has been throughout history, in a territorial dispute. This dispute involves Jews.

  The Middle East of fantasy offers not two groups of human beings endeavoring to sort out a tragedy but one group of human beings and a group of Jews.

  The armchair Marxists, Holocaust deniers, anti-Semites, and other propounders of the “special case” will not forgo the sick sexual pleasure of these fantasies. Those of clearer vision and goodwill may see, in these fantasies, the permitted, vicious, and boundless license for hatred engendered by the mythic identification of not one
but two subhuman groups: the world-conquering Christ-killing Jews, and the powerless perfect-victim Palestinians, who know no better than to murder their own young.

  * * *

  Ritual

  Ours is an interesting society. There is much gratification and striving toward gratification but little joy.

  The absence of joy is compensated for by aggression and greed. “Perhaps,” the unhappy think, “I can find joy in appropriating that which belongs to someone else.” The Jewish tropism toward assimilation is, in large part, a race-specific example of the more generalized contemporary American greed, which is the wish for more, the deeper meaning of which is the wish for better, or change.

  But lunacy may be defined as the compulsion to repeat the same action in response to the same stimulus and wish for a different result.

  The assimilated Jew, whether conscious of the drive or not, muddles toward community and calls it self-actualization, self-help, agnosticism, Buddhism, sports participation or rooting, in much the same way as the wealthy try, serially, this or that new car, home, husband, or wife. Each initially exciting new choice, of course, pales with familiarity, as it was not the previous toy that was deficient but the individual’s understanding of his own needs. The lack is not in his choice but in his obsession—in himself.

  Why would he, the wicked son, discard his heritage, his religion, his race, and his natural community? What does he actually hope to gain by his supposed freedom?

  The Jewish word for apostate is apikoros, a corruption of the Greek name Epicurius, whose philosophic school held that the highest good was to choose, unfettered by prejudice or tradition, among the good things the world has to offer. If this is, as he holds, the highest good, why is the apikoros miserable?