“You dad’s fine,” Flowers said.
But the thing was I could remember three such newscasted “Jews” off the top of my head, and since I could, I did. I heard the first one after the Ishmaelites attacked the Fairfield Street Synagogue: “The youths assaulted the Jews-the Jewish congregants with stones,” said an NBC 5 Local News reporter. A week later, on the ABC 7 Nightly News: “The Jews-the Jewish-the Israeli soldiers entered Gaza at seven this morning.” A month after that, in a round-table discussion on CSPAN, the Reuters Middle East Bureau Chief was asked by the moderator: “To the best of your knowledge, what percentage of Jew-Zionist-Israeli citizens would support the release of imprisoned Hamas freedom fighters in exchange for a cessation of hostilities against the militant settlers?” Those were just the ones I remembered verbatim. There were others, too, each of them uttered in a discussion occasioned by violent activity. Sometimes the Israelites had done the violence; other times they had suffered it. Sometimes the stammer seemed to unmask something and other times it just seemed like a stammer.
“Shit,” Flowers said, staring at my hand.
A plastic sliver was jammed in the muscle of my thumb. I pulled it with my teeth. The hole was triangular.
Flowers shuddered, wadded leaves of Kleenex the color of lemon ice cream, pressed the wad to the wound.
“You dad’s fine,” he said.
I spit the sliver into my cupped left hand, dropped it into a pocket, watched the tissue get wet and orange.
“Say something,” said Flowers.
I said, Now I’ll say ‘a Jew’ and just the word ‘Jew’ sounds like a dirty word and people don’t know whether to laugh or not.
“Lenny Bruce?” Flowers said.
Yeah, I said.
“Funny man,” said Flowers. “You—”
Sometimes, I said.
“You dad’s fine,” Flowers said.
Scholars recognize three significant aspects of the conversation Avraham has with Hashem on the eve of Sodom’s destruction. First, the conversation is an argument: the patriarch of patriarchs, the original model of exemplary Israelite behavior, tells Hashem that He is about to make a mistake. Second, Hashem, rather than smiting Avraham for arguing — He does not punish Avraham at all — listens to what Avraham has to say. Third, there is the substance of what Avraham says: that when faced with the choice, it is not only more important to save a righteous person than it is to destroy a wicked one, but more important to save a righteous person than to destroy numerous wicked ones.
Even though, if not because, these three aspects of the conversation are so significant, others of no less significance tend to get overlooked. One is how Avraham says what he says, another when he says it. He enters the conversation like an accuser — raging, scornful, indignant above all — and he does so at a moment when a scholar would expect indignation to be the last thing he would feel. It was only three days earlier that Hashem told Avraham he would have the thing he wanted most in the world — a son with Sarah — and, for that reason, a scholar might expect Avraham to feel joyous; or, if not joyous, then maybe weak, for immediately after learning that Isaac would be born, Avraham circumsized himself, and the third post-operative day is known to be the most painful, more painful even than the bris itself. That Avraham would feel exhausted is another possibility. If neither weak with pain nor joyous with news of a son-to-be, then maybe, a scholar might think, Avraham would be exhausted by the tasks of dutiful hosting: only seconds before Hashem told him of His plans for Sodom, Avraham bade farewell to the angels Hashem sent to his tent to test his hospitality, a test he passed without complaint, despite the pain of the third day.
Then again, it is within the very same utterance of His plans for Sodom that Hashem reiterates His pledge to give Avraham a son with Sarah — more than a son, in fact. “Shall I conceal from Avraham what I do,” Hashem begins, “now that Avraham is surely to become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall bless themselves by him?” At which a scholar would expect Avraham to feel — if not in addition to joyous or weak or exhausted, then in place of those feelings — safe, protected; certainly not indignant.
Yet Avraham, once Hashem is through speaking, once the plans for Sodom have been laid out before him (“Because the outcry of Sodom and Gomorrah has become great, and because their sin has been very grave,” Hashem has just finished saying, “I will descend and see: If they act in accordance with its outcry which has come to Me — then destruction! And if not, I will know.”), Avraham does the most dangerous thing imaginable. He lashes out at the guarantor of his safety, raises his voice to challenge his protector. He yells at God.
“What if there should be fifty righteous people in the midst of Sodom?” says Avraham. “Would You still stamp it out rather than spare the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people within it? It would be sacrilege to You to do such a thing, to bring death upon the righteous along with the wicked. It would be sacrilege to You! Shall the judge of all the earth not do justice?”
And Hashem not only listens to Avraham — this brown old man shouting accusations in the desert, this defiant creation waving his fist — but attempts to appease him. And this makes a scholar wonder — or at least it should make a scholar wonder — if coming to Hashem full of rage is not sometimes (on those occasions when the scholar faces injustice, for example) a better idea than coming to Him full of praise. “If I find fifty righteous people in Sodom,” says Hashem, “I will spare the city on their account.”
And Avraham, though no longer as indignant, is nonetheless unappeased. “What if there are five fewer?” he says. “What if there are forty-five righteous people in Sodom?”
And Hashem says that for forty-five, he’ll spare the city. And Avraham continues to bargain. From forty-five to forty, forty to thirty, thirty to twenty, and then, says Avraham, “Let not my Lord be annoyed and I will speak but this once: What if ten should be found there?”
And Hashem says, “I will not destroy on account of the ten.”
The next line closes the chapter: “Hashem departed when He had finished speaking to Avraham, and Avraham returned to his place.”
When He had finished speaking: not when Avraham had finished speaking to Him; not when they had finished speaking to one another. “When He had finished speaking to Avraham” = “Avraham was not finished speaking.”
So what would Avraham have said, had Hashem not departed just then? It should be as obvious to scholars as it was to Hashem.
He would have said, “Five righteous men?” And if Hashem tried to appease him, he would have said, “Three righteous men?” And if Hashem agreed to three, he would have said, “And one?”
There are some scholars who will disagree with these assertions. Some scholars will argue that there is no way of knowing if I am right or wrong, no way to know if Avraham was as settled on the number ten as was Hashem. Some may even argue that the phrase prefacing Avraham’s last spoken sally of the argument, a phrase which, to me, reads as nothing more than an act of formal self-effacement that one who has just finished yelling indignantly at the Creator of the Universe would, on calming down a little bit, think wise to employ — some scholars might argue that “Let my Lord not be annoyed and I will speak but this once” indicates that Avraham had no intention of continuing to bargain. And those scholars would have a point, just not a very significant one.