He must once have been a good pulpit speaker, even though Buttenhausen, as he said, had only a tiny synagogue, where it was often possible only with a great deal of difficulty to assemble a minyan. ‘But what was I to do? Rabbinate positions were thin on the ground, and as a theologian fresh out of college one had to take what one could get. An interesting word, by the way, ‘theologian’. If one returns to the Greek root it actually means nothing more than a person who talks about God — and one can of course also talk about things that do not exist. About unicorns, about dragons or indeed about the Lord God.’
‘But our world must…’
Dr Stern interrupted Pinchas with an expansive gesture. ‘My dear friend,’ he said, and it sounded like ‘My dear congregation’, ‘My dear friend, I hope you are not going to bother me with one of these proofs of God’s existence. Which one were about to take out of your pocket? The cosmological? The ontological? The teleological? All of them refute long ago. Read Kant! Read Schopenhauer! “The fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason.” The world does not need a first mover. It bears its laws within itself! We need only recognise them. Voilà!’ He gave a little hop, a circus artist returning to terra firma after a daring tightrope walk, and expecting applause.
‘And who made those laws?’
‘Nobody.’ Dr Stern, the man whom one could as little imagine without his title as without his trousers, dabbed his forehead dry with his silk handkerchief. Pinchas had a sense that he had practised the elegant movement in front of the mirror. ‘When the sun is shining, no one sits there heating an oven. Natural laws need no almighty creator to set the first ball rolling. The universe is as it is. Our fate is what we make of it. The world — to bring it down to its lowest common denominator — is as we form it. It is only because we are afraid of this responsibility that we invent punitive deities and in their name draw up laws for whose consequences we may thus not be held to account.’
‘But the Torah…’
Dr Stern caught this objection in mid-air as well, a juggler whose hand is always in the place to which the next ball is about to fly. ‘The Torah is literature,’ he said. ‘Very fine literature, in fact. Like many of our writings, incidentally. I myself have brought out a small volume with Reclam’s Universalbibliothek: Rays of Light from the Talmud, a collection of quotations valuable not least from the pedagogic point of view. One had only to pick them carefully out from among all the silly legends — I am thinking for example of the woolgathering tales of such a one as Rabba bar bar Chana — and the overheated sophistications of the interpretations of the law. The moral clarity of our scholars is strangely at odds with the logical confusion of Talmudic ritual. One might even say: where Judaism manages without God, it can serve as an excellent model for other people.’ And, inspired by his own eloquence, he made the watch-chain on his belly skip, laughed deeply from his throat and ran the back of his hand over his moustache.
Pinchas, who took part in the shiur of the Talmud-Torah Association twice a week, had the feeling that he knew a thousand arguments against such blasphemous talk, but not a single one came to mind. If he could have led this debate in the familiar evening classroom, protected by the bulwark of a shelf full of ancient tomes… But here, in the bright light of the lakeside promenade, under the fresh green of the trees, here, where a disobliging-looking nanny in a starched blue and white blouse led two little girls in pink by the hand, where an old lady was scattering cake-crumbs into the water from a greasy paper bag, for swans and ducks to dispute over with belligerent gulls, here, where a teacher had assembled his whole class around him so that he could name all the peaks of the alpine panorama, clearly visible today thanks to the föhn air — here he felt helpless. Debating the nuances of a word, the finer points of the interpretation of a law — that he was used to. But someone simply wanting to tear down the whole intellectual edifice on which so many generations of scholars and their pupils had taken such trouble — that left him speechless. He walked along in silence beside Dr Stern, who kept dancing with excitement at the abundance of his own self-confidence.
Their path led them past the improvised geography lesson, where the teacher was just saying, ‘Over there, still shrouded in fog, you will see the Grosse Mythe and the Kleine Mythe.’ Dr Stern chuckled, a rich man winning the lottery on top of everything. ‘You see, my dear friend,’ he said, wiping his moustache with the back of his hand, ‘this bold pedagogue has just summed up my whole argument in the most concise form. We humans come up with myths, big ones and small ones, we claim they are as solid as fortresses, and mask our own doubts with a fog of traditions and rituals.’
‘It’s easy to believe in nothing at all.’ Pinchas felt unfamiliar fury welling up in him.
‘On the contrary, my friend.’ Dr Stern had also been expecting this sentence, like a practised dancer taking his partner’s hand without looking at the end of a complicated figure. ‘Believing in nothing is difficult! What is easy is to swallow down without resistance the mush of ideas, pre-chewed a thousand times, of previous generations. It is easy to bend the knee obediently, to cross yourself, put on the tefillin, jump over a burning pyre at midnight, or whatever strange rituals our forefathers came up with in the name of their self-invented deities. It is easy to accept holy scriptures as God-given, to accept the premises of a religion uncritically and use one’s intelligence only to draw constant new conclusions from it. We Jews are true masters in the art of gnawing our way through the finest ramifications of supposedly divine laws, like woodworm in a long-dead tree. Night after night we study medieval commentaries, just to understand debates pursued fifteen hundred years ago, we talk ourselves blue in the face about the rituals of sacrificial services in a temple destroyed two thousand years ago. We waste our intelligence because we lack the courage to question ancient fairy-tales. Fairy-tales, yes indeed! But in fact: he who does not wish to think must believe.’ He was so pleased with that last sentence that he performed a little dance on the spot. Two elderly ladies peered at him disapprovingly from under their parasols.
‘You know what strikes me?’ Pinchas asked and felt rising up in him the combative anticipation that emerges from the sense of a watertight argument. ‘You know what even strikes me a lot about you? You still say “we”. “We Jews.” So for all your protests you are still part of it.
‘Let’s say: I don’t exclude myself from it. Or only as long as the concept refers to the community of a people and not of a faith. But otherwise… In this connection I can tell you a funny story.’ He pointed to one of the wooden benches that the Beautification Society had set up along the promenade. ‘The sun will do me good, after all those long hours in the Congress Room.’ He carefully wiped a trace of pollen off the green painted slats, made himself comfortable in the middle of the seat, his arms spread out on the back, and when Pinchas continued to hesitate, tapped invitingly on the narrow free space beside him. ‘Sit down next to me, my dear friend! I promise you, you will enjoy yourself royally.’