to do with the stories is the question. For the believer: How do we maintain the myth when history rejects its literal truth? For the non-believer: where do we find our life-supporting illusions when our scientific instruments interrupt our imaginations?
For Himsel, the answer comes slowly, agonizingly, as she attempts a vertiginous balancing act between her critical reading of the old tales, and her desperate desire to cling to the stories so deeply embedded within her they cannot be excised, only reoriented. Jesus takes on an even more fully human figure: a Semitic man, a Jew, living in the Galilee. Through that understanding, she grows enamored with Israel’s Jews and their story. Still, she struggles with what appears to be Jewish indifference to Jesus, blending the Jesus of history, the Jew from Galilee, with Jesus the mythic figure in the great apocalyptic drama to come, her own yearning for that great encounter still beating. In a friend’s sukkah during the Sukkot holiday, she finds herself agonizing over this:
I looked up at the Jerusalem sky. . . . Without believing in Jesus, I thought, Jews were missing out on a big part of the meaning of the Feast. It didn’t just recall Moses wandering in the desert for 40 years. It also represented the second resurrection. If I remained in the church, I would be there when the last trumpet was blown and the dead were resurrected from the ground. I wanted to be there.
Where we thought she had let go of Jesus, we find she has not. She herself, over and over, thinks Jesus gone, only to find that he has returned. And with that, somehow, the myth lives.
Back in the states, after moving to New York City, she encounters Jews once again. This time, she must reconcile the seeming contradiction of Jews who maintain the centrality of their own story, even as many choose to ignore the faith built upon it. Her boyfriend Selig, son of an Orthodox rabbi but himself not observant, confounds her most, with his ease in finding the synthesis that so eludes her. Most of all, she struggles with the inexpressible burdens of the mythology within her. “The power of Jesus’s blood, and my stubborn refusal to completely let go of the church,” she tells us, “was not easy to explain.”
Again and again, there he is, Jesus, appearing and reappearing, just as she thinks she’s moved on. “Like an old boyfriend I still had feelings for, but to whom I couldn’t quite commit. If I actively rejected Jesus whose blood had been sacrificed to give me eternal life . . . the door to the Next World would be forever shut to me. I would never see those I’ve loved and lost and who resided there.”
Not Jesus of history, not Jesus the Jew, not even the Jesus of the theologian, mere doctrinal symbol, but Jesus and his crimson, metallic blood, as true and as real as the blood of her own finger when pricked. Jesus who might show up in front of the courthouse in Jasper. Jesus, to whose bosom she yearns to be close. Jesus, whose blood sacrifice is to give her eternal life.
Himsel ends with: “You always return for blood.” Indeed, blood is a recurring theme in Himsel’s story. The blood of her own German ancestry. The blood binding her to her family, even as she embraces the story of another tribe. The blood of her menses, which she discovers the Jewish faith fears obsessively. The blood of Jesus, sacrificed for her sins. Most of all, the blood of Jesus.
What, however, is blood about?
“For the life of every creature is its blood,” the Bible tells us in Leviticus, and if blood itself has a life force within it, it is story. It is history. It is myth.
As Himsel clung to her own stories, I, too, find myself clinging to mine. The atlas will never show the Sambatyon, but its force still has power over me, the legend of the lost tribes still exciting my imagination. The Maharal and the golem, too, are forever true to me; they will never be otherwise, even as the historic truth says otherwise.
When the myth is dispelled, there is nothing secure to hold onto. When the myths lose their power, the edifices built upon them shake, crumble, and with them, we fear, goes life itself. And so the task then is to keep the story alive. To retain the myth. The myth that gives us life. The story within the blood.
PROLOGUE
On a warm, slipping-into-autumn, New York City morning in September 1988, just before my twenty-seventh birthday, I realized my period was a day late. Or maybe even two days late. I wasn’t rigorous about keeping track of it. My period was like my bank account—if it was within my mental ballpark, I didn’t worry. But then it was three days late, and five days, and finally my younger sister Sarah said, “You know, you might be pregnant.”
“I don’t think so.”
Denial was one of my trademark characteristics. But in this case, I had reason not to be too concerned. My boyfriend, Selig, was fourteen years older than me and had been married before. A doctor had told him and his then wife that he was infertile.
When I met Selig, I was twenty-two and had just moved to New York City from my hometown in southern Indiana. I was ambivalent about marriage, kids, or commitments of any kind, the residue of growing up the seventh of eleven children in the Worldwide Church of God, a small, apocalyptic, doomsday faith whose ministers shouted, “Brethren, Satan roams society like a lion seeking to devour you! God has raised up this Church to warn the world that the End Times are coming!”
Who would choose to bring kids into a world that was coming to an end very soon?
So once, just once, Selig and I were careless about birth control.
“Take a pregnancy test,” Sarah urged.
The blood never came.
CHAPTER 1
My mostly German ancestral blood determined my physical characteristics: tall, very light-skinned, blue eyes, and blonde hair. And while blood doesn’t determine one’s spiritual beliefs, it certainly has an influence.
Until the year 1500, both my mother’s and my father’s German ancestors in Pettendorf and Hummeltal, Hamburg, Berge, Prignitz, and Mistelgau were Roman Catholic. Maybe they were devout. Maybe not. Maybe they resented that the Catholic Church demanded taxes and church fees. Common practice in Catholicism at the time was that if they couldn’t pay, they were threatened with excommunication or denied the sacraments they needed to save their souls. Whatever they may have privately felt about the Roman Catholic Church, they wouldn’t dare speak out. But then, a German monk named Martin Luther challenged the papal practice of selling indulgences. Luther believed that forgiveness was for God to decide, and buying an indulgence would not absolve people from punishment or ensure their salvation.
Martin Luther became synonymous with the Protestant Reformation—the protesters against Catholicism. Protestants stripped Christianity down to its essentials. The Bible, not the pope, reigned supreme. All who believed in Christ were “priests.” Clergy could even marry. At age forty-one, Martin Luther himself married a nun, a woman he had helped smuggle out of a convent in a herring barrel. While irrelevant to Luther’s religious beliefs, a nun in a herring barrel is always worth mentioning.
The religious schism in the seventeenth century between Catholics and Lutherans culminated in the Thirty Years’ War, a war that splattered the blood of one-fifth of all Germans—millions of souls—into the soil. Until World War II, it was one of the longest and worst catastrophes in European history.
Ultimately, my mother’s German ancestors remained Catholic, while my father’s sided with Evangelical Lutheranism. It wasn’t either family’s decision. Each village was obliged to accept whatever religion the local lord chose. Some villages went back and forth between Catholicism and Lutheranism for centuries.
In the 1840s, both my mother’s Catholic family and my father’s Lutheran one uprooted themselves and pressed westward across the ocean to America, escaping internal revolts, high taxes, and crop failures in their farming villages.
They replanted themselves in the wooded, rolling hills of southern Indiana, where their seeds of every kind took