For a minute longer I stood there, concentrating on purpose on the grotesque artistic clumsiness of the gesture of kneeling, and I let the self-loathing pour through me and fill me completely. For one more minute I examined the rather blackened face of the Madonna, with its expression of autistic sweetness, and only then I turned to go. “Comedian,” my Grandma Dora’s word came back to me, “comedian, comedian, comedian,” and to the hammering of this word, “comedian,” I made my way through the crowd of tourists and pilgrims to the door of the church.
URGES AND IMPULSES
When she completes her studies Hagar will be a rabbi, and when she finds herself a congregation she will also marry people. In the framework of her tireless efforts to educate me, she recently sent me a collection of articles about the importance of “rites of passage” and the enlightened alternative ways of celebrating them. I read my lucid daughter’s lucid contribution, and paged disinterestedly through the rest of the collection, and the next morning I sat down to compose a careful maternal response. I praised the quality of the production and the editing, thanked her for the illuminating analysis of the components of the marriage ceremony and especially the interesting interpretation of the apparel of the bride, expressed my not completely sincere wish that the numbers of religious people like her fellow students would grow in Israel, too, and only at the bottom of the page made the barbed comment: “… I still have my doubts as to whether anthropologists can serve as priests.”
“Understanding the meanings of the rites we perform doesn’t turn us into anthropologists,” my daughter answered in a hasty e-mail, “our awareness doesn’t contradict our faith, and as far as I’m concerned it only strengthens it.”
If I had told Hagar the story of the morning I got married — which I have no intention of doing — she would have seen it as conclusive proof both of my need for ritual, and of my repressed religious feeling. And she would also have said that if I had been married in a Jewish ceremony that was “progressive” and “meaningful,” rather than in the Rabbinate, my feet would not have led me to a church. But that’s not the point, it’s something else entirely, which I can’t explain to her: I’m not denying the existence of the religious impulse, who am I to deny it, I’m only denying the existence of a godhead to which this impulse is directed. And I’m certainly not convinced that my intelligent daughter really believes in God.
She certainly possesses an urge to believe. It’s not clear to me where it comes from or why, but it’s there — maybe this desire is genetic, maybe she inherited it from her parents. But the desire to believe is not the same as belief itself, and my daughter’s garrulous religiosity is in my eyes only a self-indulgent courting of a bad impulse. An act of buffoonery, exactly like my almost kneeling in front of a badly painted icon of the Virgin Mary.
I didn’t understand much at the ages of seventeen and eighteen. Since then I’ve come to understand a little more, and when I recall things that Alek said, and even more so the way he stood there in the church, it seems to me that the religious impulse was aroused in him then to a degree or in a manner that he still needed to fight, and it was only for the sake of this war that he went to church. Liberating the experience in order to overcome it and emerge as someone who had triumphed over himself.
And what was I doing there? The Christian God was Alek’s God, the specific god that Alek didn’t believe in. But a god you don’t believe in is still a god, and so it happened that when I was pining for Alek’s love, I went and prostrated myself to his gods.
I have already made it clear, I think, that I find no touching charm or beauty in this — though this is not absolutely the truth. However much I despise myself for my attacks of religious epilepsy, I despise my daughter, without any justification, more. Despise not only her convenient, dietetic, easy to digest religion, but she herself, for the small, civilized instinct that she cultivates by will. Hagar is of course not deserving of this contempt, and who am I to despise my honest daughter, immeasurably more honest than I.
Since Hagar’s new Jewishness isn’t only an aspect of her life, but something that determines it more and more, the diplomatic dishonesty in our relationship will no doubt grow greater over the years. With her grandmothers, astonishingly enough, Hagar has found a common language, and her preoccupation with religion has only increased the love that they both feel for her anyway. My mother is capable of spending hours nodding in admiration as my daughter lectures her on Jewish culture/Jewish renewal/new ways of interpreting Jewish traditions, etc. Meekly she agrees that a great injustice had been done her by her parents who robbed her of “her roots,” “her culture” and “her Jewish bookshelf,” and glowing with pride she occasionally accompanies her granddaughter to Saturday morning services at her progressive synagogue.
As for Grandmother Marina, Alek’s mother, it seems to me that she is happy that her granddaughter is showing an interest in “spirituality,” even though she has no idea of the nature of this “spirituality,” and although no serious discussion is possible between them, both because they have no common language, and because of the vast cultural gap between them.
When her father invited her to visit him in Paris, after she was discharged from the army and after my first visit to Moscow, Hagar was still at the beginning of her “Judaization” process, full of conceptual doubts and willing to sit up until the wee hours of morning debating such questions as “What is Jewish identity?” and “Is Judaism a religion/nationality or a culture?” In her debating style she sometimes reminds me more of Amikam than of her father. In the ten days she spent with her grandmother in Paris the child did not find an answer to the vexing question of whether Grandmother Marina, who had secretly converted to Christianity while still in Russia, could be considered a Jew.
I understood that all kinds of relations who were strangers to her and also strangers who weren’t related to her at all, enveloped her in warmth and love there, fed her as if she were a baby, accompanied her everywhere she went so that she wouldn’t get lost in the big city, and that no serious clarifications took place, either with Alek or with Marina. Alek waited for her outside when she went into Notre Dame Cathedral, and at the same opportunity remarked, by the way, that in recent years his mother’s church attendance had fallen off. A couple of times Marina said grace in Russian when they sat down to eat; over her and her husband’s double bed hung a triangle of beautiful icons — what the husband, Jenia’s, position was on these matters I do not know, for some reason he was seldom mentioned, as if he didn’t count — and when they parted at the airport Marina covertly made the sign of the cross over her granddaughter’s head. These were all the clues that Hagar received, and she had no idea what to make of them, but for a while it seemed that her tendency to set the world in order in the same way as she tidied her room had been swallowed up in a torrent of sense impressions: the smell of cheese and roasting chestnuts, the taste of new foods, the giddiness of the wine to which she was not accustomed, an exhibition of paintings, a statue, the view of a street framed in a café window.