So we’re not hurting. Shull and Tober pay me forty-two thousand a year and lease my house to me for the taxes and utilities. Also — this is privileged information — I do maybe another ten or fifteen K a year in tips. Don’t misunderstand me, my hand ain’t out. It’s just that my pickup congregations don’t always know the arrangements. How would they? Is a bill the decorous, proper place to stick in the overhead? Would the price of the electric be listed, what it takes to run the fridges and deep freezes, the cost of the fossil fuels burned in a good, roaring cremation? Why itemize the rabbi then? Certain things you assume. You weren’t born yesterday, you know I don’t come to you because the bereaved are good company. You figure something has to be in it for me, that solace and ceremony cost. So there’s often a check already made out with a blank where my name goes, one or two hundred bucks maybe. Shull shuts one eye and Tober the other. That’s the arrangement.
So I make a good living. What with one thing and another, my salary, my tips and my perks. But that’s not it. Why I told my daughter that leaving Lud was out of the question.
The fact is, I have obligations. I’m in my rabbi mode here, talking ex cathedra. A fellow’s family comes first. I’ve got the numbers. Three of the Ten Commandments relate directly to the family. Thirty percent. You honor your parents, you don’t covet your neighbor’s wife, you don’t commit adultery. God Himself counts for another three, the graven image and name-in-vain bits, and the business about no other gods before Him. It’s an even-steven split about the Sabbath day. So a fellow’s family comes at least first.
I’m just doing my duty is the way this cleric figures it. Why I shush my dejected, scared-stiff, upset, importunate little girl, wave her from the room and go to put my arms around her mother. Family comes first and the wife takes pride of place. Husbands and wives before sons and daughters. Honor thy Mom and Dad, runs the commandment, not the other way round. If Lord-of-All-Worlds wanted us to honor the kids he’d have spelled it out. He’s a don’t-mince-words sort of God, a stickler. The last thing He is is reticent. He covers the material. “You shall not do any work,” He instructs us re the Sabbath, “you, or your son, or your daughter, or your manservant, or your maidservant, or your cattle, or the sojourner who is within your gates.” Doesn’t He even spell out the dimensions of the ark itself down to the last cubit, God like a voice from the Heathkit?
It’s a sort of sacrament then, what I’m doing, my husbandly obligation. I have to protect her from her nuttiness and outrageousness. Shelley would go crazy in a real congregation. So I have to condescend to her behind her back.
And they say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Do you know how much worse it is for you to be burdened with a lot? My heart goes out to the President and Joint Chiefs, to high-ups in the CIA and secret services, to everyone top-secreted, eyes-only’d. To editors with stories they dassn’t break. To anyone with knowledge too hot to handle. Oh, it’s awful, too terrible, and worse yet for the Rabbi of Lud. You think not? Are you kidding? Privy to the counsels of God? This is my rabbi mode. I don’t fool around in my rabbi mode. This is straight from my studies, my lessons in the Forbidden Practices seminar with Rabbi Chaim on the atoll in the Maldives. From my practically pitch-perfect memory of those notes that we were not only required to destroy at the end of each class, but required to destroy in front of the bearded, sidelocked monitors in their long coats and ancient Polish gabardines, the Orthodox proctors of my offshore schooldays.
We don’t tell you this stuff, the cruel, arcane orthodoxies that would scare you off and keep you out of Paradise — that it’s forbidden to dip your right eye in an eyecup, that you can’t be buried in your jewelry, no, not your wedding or engagement rings, not your locket with the picture of your kids, not even so much as a red paper Poppy Day flower or a tin button on your lapel from the Red Cross. That you mustn’t look at an X ray or handle the vital organs of a woman taken in adultery. That you shouldn’t wear contact lenses or shoes with lifts. That, strictly speaking — all of this is strictly speaking, of course — it goes against God’s law to walk with a cane more beautiful than the leg it’s intended to support or to use any prosthesis that improves upon the original body part. (Jews may place no hearing aid in their ears that corrects hearing acuity beyond what is considered normal in the population as a whole.) Left-handedness in an unmarried woman is a sin and, according to some interpretations of Talmud, a man may be denied his place with God if he can lift three times his own body weight. You’d be amazed how much evil we do without ever knowing it.
But the family comes first and, after the wife, the consanguineous loyalties are clear. Husbands and wives before sons and daughters, but sons and daughters before brothers and sisters. Am I my brother’s keeper? Of course not. Even old Cain knew it was a rhetorical question. The attenuate blood trailing away, thinning out and burning off till, if you want to know, the idea of humanity and the notion of universal love go up in smoke. God is no humanist, no One Worlder, and is hostile to the very concept of brotherhood. The fact of the matter is, even the thought of family, of family in its broader, metaphorical sense, is distressing to Him. He doesn’t want His people to get too cozy. And in Isaiah? The wolf dwell with the lamb? The leopard lie down with the kid? The calf, lion and fading together? Cows and bears feeding, and the big cats scarfing straw like the ox? This is theology? This is wish fulfillment. This is typos, bad translations, rotten scholarship. No? Give me a break. Are you kidding? Why did He give us zoos and cages then? Isaiah was a wuss.
To tell the truth, I talk too much. I don’t have the character to be this Rabbi of Lud. Not twenty-five years out of the Forbidden Practices seminar and already I’m selling my teachers and proctors down the river. “Sure,” I hear them saying, “go on, go ahead. Let everyone in on the cabala, why not? Tell them Lord of All Outdoors doesn’t even need rabbis, that He knew what He was doing when He invented the Diaspora, Hansel’d and Gretel’d the Jews and lost ten tribes of Israel. Go on, go ahead, blow your own people’s cover. Tell them, shout it from the rooftops, my yiddishe mama was a bad Jew, and chicken soup Hebes go against Nature. Go, ruin it for anyone who happens to believe Himself Himself is some big-spending Democrat, for the dole, disarmament, all the unilaterals, the A.D.C and other agencies.”
Well, of course you can’t look this up. It’s privileged information. Why do you suppose we were sworn to secrecy, why do you think we had to tear up those notes?
Me, I don’t agree with His politics. I happen to like and respect my fellow man. If it had been me, I’d have left Christ alone, and let him die our crowd’s natural death, overweight, and all stressed-, smoked-, whitefish’d and cholesterol’d out, like anyone else in his early thirties.