everything but the notion of Jews succumbing to great and powerful forces.
Among the four soldiers, my father was more or less a secularist who wrote poetry in his native Hebrew about romance and freedom and the dreams of a people hoping to have a safe haven at last. He identified with Jewish history more than its prayer books; that history was now an existential crisis for him and his army pals.
The other three, also young, homesick, and fearful, included one Orthodox Jew, one survivor of several Nazi death camps, and one Christian American—a veteran of World War II who had now volunteered for this tour because of what he had seen Europe do to its Jews. The night was long and a cold wind blew in from the Samarian Mountains. The four men were charged to stay awake and watch for enemy infiltrators. They were exceedingly vulnerable and made shoddy jokes along with small chatter as they rubbed their gloved hands over the campfire. They methodically checked their weapons, worried about an ambush at any moment.
They began talking about God.
What was God’s role in this terrible situation, my father asked out loud. Would God protect them and the precious little land they were attempting to defend? Was there even a God?
“What God?” The Holocaust survivor rang out with bitterness. “After what I saw in the camps, after I saw my parents murdered, people gassed, children thrown into sacks and beaten to death for sport, you think there is a God?”
There was an interlude of silence as the young men felt the cold begin to carve its way into their bone marrow. They added more wood to the struggling fire as the pious one began to softly sing psalms to himself. The three others looked at him as he hummed and formed ancient words that turned into little bursts of fog flying out of his mouth into the frigid midnight.
“What do you think?” My father asked the psalmist. “This one says there is no God while you shiver here praying to him.”
“Of course there is a God,” came the reply. “And in fact, God is so involved in this that really none of us will have anything to say about the outcome of this war, whether we live or die. It is up to God to decide if we are to have a Holy Land again. It’s already been preordained in heaven so there’s really nothing for us to worry about. We are just part of a higher purpose.”
The American cleared his throat. “I tend to agree with that, I must say. And it’s not like I go to church or anything. Not on any regular basis. I mean, sure, on Christmas Eve and such, but not all the time. But I do feel that God has something to do with this. After what happened in France and Italy and then in Germany, when I got there. Not just to the Jews, but also to my buddies and so many people I saw get killed or maimed. All the suffering. Maybe I’m here because after all of that I want to see some justice done. And that makes me feel that this Jewish story here, this reclaiming the land, is, well, biblical. I just want to see some evidence that God cares or something along those lines.”
“Maybe you just like war,” my father teased him. “Or you don’t have any friends back in Utah where you came from.” All of them laughed out loud, a cascade of nervous release and a fleeting sense of comfort in the shared predicament of mortality.
“It’s Idaho,” came the smiling rejoinder from the American. “And so what do you think about God?”
My father really did not know. He thought about it for a moment. “For some reason, when we sit here and talk about God in this situation we’re in, I’m thinking about and really missing my mother’s homemade honey pastry. I can practically smell the kitchen and the little cakes coming out of the oven, dripping with sweetness, and my mother smiling at us and telling us to wash our hands before having the treat. We did, of course, but then we always had to wash them again afterward because they were sticky with the honey. We licked our fingers before she made us wash our hands again.”
The four sat around, wistful and worried and hoping to get back home to their kitchens, their bedrooms, their little sanctuaries where no one could do them any harm. After a while, my father suggested they vote on the question: Is there a God or not?
Whenever my father told me this story, he would pause and chuckle at this point. He liked it, I think, that he was the one who put the question to a vote. I would look into his deep brown eyes and notice his thick black curly hair and feel so thankful that he came home from that campfire so long ago.
“What was the vote?” I’d ask, even years after I knew the answer.
“The vote was 4–0. There is a God, but we’d better get more rifles.”
YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO ARGUE WITH GOD
“What will the Egyptians say?”
—MOSES TO GOD
IT WAS JUST FOUR college chums going out to the movies. Granted, the offering that chilly winter night in Cincinnati was not typical fare. The Exorcist was a runaway blockbuster because of both its chilling storyline and because many religious authoritarians, especially in the Catholic Church, had a big problem with it. No wonder: In their minds, it sensationalized an extremely grave matter in church theology—the invasion of a human being by a satanic demon and the treacherous, sacred rite of exorcizing it from the person. For church zealots, this is serious business and hardly the appropriate material for Hollywood thrillers.
Three of my campus buddies joined me as we trekked out to see “the movie about the possessed girl whose head spins around.” Everybody was talking about that supernatural horror film, and we were intrigued. It had already been named “the scariest film of all time” by Entertainment Weekly.
My friend Eric Downey was joining us against the wishes of his stern Catholic parents. I grew up a few doors from the Downeys on a street that literally ended at the gates of Our Mother of Sorrows Church. Eric, who was mercilessly mocked in the neighborhood for his grueling stutter, was one of nine children and his parents were active in the parish.
The Downeys were neighborly and generous and observed their faith with discreet service and good works. They wanted Eric, their middle son, to enter the priesthood. They did not want him to go see The Exorcist. For them, the motion picture was a celluloid sacrilege. Perhaps they were particularly sensitive about it because the screenplay was based upon a revealing, real-life incident that exposed a whispered-about church procedure.
In 1949, Catholic priests performed a series of such exorcisms upon an anonymous boy in Maryland known as “Roland Doe.” The haunted boy’s family was actually Lutheran; the busy priests just saw a Christian child possessed and controlled by a bloodcurdling spirit and this kind of situation was a denominational specialty of theirs.
The rituals were shrouded in controversy and mystery but regarded with absolute ecclesiastic solemnity by devout Catholics. No different from the many instances across the centuries when fundamentalist or mystical Jews have grappled with a dybbuk—the dreaded but believed evil spirit that enters into a living person. The dybbuk would cleave to the poor soul, cause wild dysfunction and schizophrenia, babble through the person’s mouth and, as with other religious delusions, represent a separate and alien personality.
None of this dark folklore was on our minds as we boys romped to the cinema house. There were two shows playing and we almost made a last minute switch into Blazing Saddles—the Mel Brooks Western satire featuring Yiddish-speaking Indians and a drunken cowboy who punched out horses. Our rabid curiosity about child-actress Linda Blair’s bulging, petrifying eyes; the deep, monstrous voice that inhabited her; the notorious, rotating head; and the intermittent, projectile green vomit she emitted all won us over.
The movie was at once, ghoulish, unsettling, clever, and cartoonish. There are good reasons why it spawned several sequels and is now a classic enshrined in the National Film Registry of the Library of