saying, “I swear to God, I don’t believe in God.”) Could you say “goddamn”? Would God punish us for hanging out in the backyard of our neighbors’ home at night to sneak peeks at their teenage daughter, Gloria, as she came into her bedroom naked after a bath? Would he exact payback for our chewing gum on Yom Kippur?
Kate smith sang “God Bless America” on Ed Sullivan, and we all sang “America the Beautiful” in classrooms, asking God to shed his grace. The presidents ended their talks with “God bless America.” Money said “In God we trust.” Men and women who helped the poor and those who donated their time to charitable causes, as my mother did, were said to be doing God’s work, and when the snow in Cleveland reached five or six inches we stayed home from school because of what was called an act of God. Something that occurred in the nick of time, a stroke of good fortune, was a Godsend, and one eluded an unhappy fate by the grace of God. God was the ultimate signifier. Adonai and Elohim and Ha Shem and Jehovah and all the various other names attributed to the invisible prime mover, the patriarch in the sky, were represented by that three-letter word. He was our God and the God of our fathers.
And he was my God. God Almighty. God the omnipotent. God the eternal, and God the everlasting. Nearly every Jewish home had a mezuzah outside its door with the Shema inscribed inside, words I said over and over and over again throughout my boyhood: “Hear oh Israel, the Lord our God. The Lord is one.” It was God, after all, who had brought my people out of bondage and provided the perennial land grant that legitimated Israel as the promised land, the newly created state surrounded by bitter enemies. God was the father of us all. I knew by heart the Christian prayer that began: “Our father who art in heaven.” He was our father and father to us all. He was my father, the force behind my existence and all others.
Before I learned to sing Christmas carols in school, I would get up on Sunday mornings, turn on the television, and watch programs about Jesus. There wasn’t much else to watch on Sunday mornings in that era. I was just past kindergarten, and I recall asking my mother and her older sister, Pearl, when Jesus was going to return. They both seemed upset, though slightly bemused, that I had come to Jesus just by watching Sunday morning Christian television programming. I was put through a quick deprogramming of warnings about why as Jews we did not and could not accept Jesus as our savior. We were believers in one God, the only God, and Jesus was not his son. I was told that I, like all boys, was a son of God, but there was no single son of God who rose from the dead after being crucified. I was dismayed by my Aunt Pearl, who said to me, “Those Jesus stories you’re watching are no more real than the cartoons.” How could that be, I wondered? How could the television not be telling me the truth?
I remember the rejoicing when Israel became a state. A homeland for Jews at last after the Shoah, the massacres, the exterminations, the genocide. A homeland promised to the Jewish people by God himself, the God of Moses, the God who gave us the Torah and the Ten Commandments, the God of “America the Beautiful” and of the Pledge of Allegiance. The God in the Thanksgiving song I sang with a group of children onstage, and even the God whose alleged son I would sing Christmas carols to while knowing he was not part of my religion. I could sing praises to Jesus without believing in him and without feeling any need for dreidel songs or Jewish rock-of-ages songs to level the song-playing-field. It didn’t matter that I didn’t believe in Jesus or his virgin birth. I knew my God, and knew he was the real king of the Jews and Israel, the land he made into a state. It was also the desert land the Jews made bloom. My mother led paper and orange sales to benefit this land, we paid for trees that would be planted in it, and we brought money for it to Hebrew school, which we put in a little blue tin box. The land promised to my ancestors.
I began to doubt God in high school. This is a common enough story. I was immersing myself in books, trying to make myself into an intellectual, discovering the worlds of science and skepticism and free-range secular thinking. I read Bertrand Russell and Charles Darwin, and I formed doubts and the doubts worried me. I suddenly couldn’t be absolutely certain God did exist or that he was involved in my life.
When time passed and I became more informed, I wondered whether Arthur Koestler was possibly right that Russian Jews like me and my family were descended from the Khazars, a band of quasi nomads of Turkic origin who converted to Judaism, rather than from the ancient Hebrews. And what was a Jewish agnostic — if that was what I was morphing into — to do about Israel? Was belief in Israel, like the Ten Commandments, contingent on belief in God? If it was the promised land that God vowed to give his chosen people, then of course it was our land and not the land of the Arabs who had been living on it and growing olive trees in its soil, and who were claiming it. Israel was the birthright of the Jewish people, and to many it was the sense that could be made out of the sacrifice of millions who died from the flames and bullets and poisons of the holocaust. Israel seemed to have more power over many of the Jews I knew and came in contact with than the Ten Commandments or any tenet of Judaism.
It seemed no accident that many Jews became ardent Zionists, socialists, communists, or feminists, as if they needed a surrogate, secular messianism to replace a more ineffable faith. People of all faiths and creeds began to have doubts. As my skepticism grew, I found that I wanted to hold on to my faith but still drew closer to agnosticism, even though agnostic, like atheist, felt like a word I could not attach myself to for fear that God, if he did exist, would punish me. Doubt did not have to mean abrogating God, did it? if God existed, how disloyal it would be to call myself an agnostic — even if I said it only to myself. My God knew my every thought and would be angry. If he did exist and loved me, I would be torn from his good graces.
As a boy I had been pious, more religious than my parents had ever dreamed I would be. With a skullcap on my head and cantorial training from the cantor’s youth club, I led services and chanted Hebrew prayers like a kid smitten, which I was, with Elvis — in the pulpit I tried to sound like a rock-and-roll cantor. Before doubt began invading me, I tended an abiding faith in God and prayed to him nightly in intimate conversational and cathartic fashion. I was certain he was listening as I released my secret thoughts and wants, not necessarily expecting him to grant what I wanted or longed for, but knowing he heard me and took full account of all my thoughts and actions. Then I read an article in the Reader’s Digest, one of the few written materials available in our house, aside from the Bible and the Merck Manual, kept on hand by my father, who was frustrated at not having become a doctor. The Digest article assured me that one should never pray for selfish wants or expect to be catered to by God. After reading the article, I feared asking God for much for myself, lest he think a vain wish should trump any deep fear I had about my safekeeping and the health and lives of my parents.
This went on for years, until I began to agonize over feelings of unrequited love in junior high school and broke my own rules by asking God, in my nightly prayers, for the girl I longed for, even though I assured him it was a prayer of lower importance. Safekeeping and protection were what mattered most. Wishes were, for the most part, to be reserved in case of emergencies; requests could be made only with utter discretion. I could, after all, wind up on crutches or in a wheelchair like kids who had polio — which, in the prevaccine era, I felt fortunate not to have. Polio could get me, as it had former president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the children whose pictures I’d seen on the March of Dimes solicitations. It was, I believed, swimming around in ready-to-attack microbial formations in Cumberland, our local municipal swimming pool.
I was also afraid of wanton violence. I knew at too young an age that it was out there lurking like a hungry tiger. I knew my people had been indiscriminately slaughtered in ovens and by Zyklon B and firing squads. If I proved myself good enough, worthy enough, surely God would protect me and those I loved from disease, suffering, violence, and death.
To a boy who embraced the tenets of his faith, the Ten Commandments were to be obeyed without question. Obedience to God meant in return, I hoped, protection from harm. The Ten Commandments were not only the foundation of Mosaic Law but also the essence of what God wanted and demanded, and one could hitch one’s faith to them. It seemed a pretty sweet deal if all I needed to do to please God and avoid his punishment was simply to obey those ten perfectly reasonable and easy-to-follow commandments. They could be carved in my heart for life as they had been carved by God himself on the stone tablets he handed down to Moses.
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