The Weekly Screed (#599)

Apostate reflections on Rosh Hashanah
by David Benjamin

BROOKLYN — So, I’m on my way to the coffee joint on a Tuesday in September, but not your ordinary Tuesday — because my neighborhood is a burgeoning enclave of Orthodox Jews, and it’s Rosh Hashanah. Sure enough, straight ahead, toddling along the sidewalk, is a teenage boy in full Hasidic dress uniform, black gabardine from head to toe, a wide-brimmed black hat perched atop his black yarmulke (like a mattress on a bottle of wine). Spitcurls frame his rosy cheeks and somewhere underneath it all is a prayer shawl and some kind of Jewish underwear I’d rather not think about.

For some reason, I’m tempted for an instant to buttonhole this unsuspecting stranger and say, “Kid, you can take it all off now. Buy some blue jeans and sneakers. Get a haircut and a Yankees cap. You’ve done your time.”

I wanted to tell the kid that I’ve been where he is. Before my mom installed me at St. Mary’s School, I was God’s little canker, barely more couth than an incontinent orangutan. In other words, I was your normal six-year-old. But after scarcely a St. Mary’s month of daily Mass, prayers before class, more praying in the cafeteria before I could touch my lunch, holy water at every doorway, catechism lessons, rosary contests, confession drills, a month of shuffling single-file here, there, everywhere, and a month of Father Rourke spewing brimstone, I was heathen no more. I was a salvaged savage doing a vigorous backstroke in the blood of the Lamb.

“Church, kid,” I wanted to say, “church is to make you behave. Church is to drill out of you a Devil you didn’t know was there. Church is to make you polite. Church is for ‘please,’ and ‘thank you,’ and ‘excuse me,’ and not ‘Hi there, sis!’ but ‘Good morning, sister.’ It’s for standing up to meet people and genuflecting when you pass the tabernacle. It’s for waiting your turn and letting girls go first and never, ever speaking ‘til you’re spoken to. Church is for doing what you’re told to do, and doing it a thousand times if necessary, ‘til you get it right, down to the last jot and the final tittle. Or else — straight to Hell.”

All the habits, rituals, schedules, gestures, poses, bows, genuflections and prostrations, chants, hymns and memorized prayers, feast days and fastings, special clothes, Sunday schools, Sabbath schools, after-school schools, holy days, rosaries and holy cards and scapulars and skullcaps and sacred relics, saying Grace and lighting candles and facing Mecca, all of this mishegoss — every self-respecting religion absolutely smothers you with things that you gotta do, gotta say, gotta look at or not look at, gotta remember, or recite or sing (even if you’re tone-deaf and you sound like the death-throes of a leg-trapped weasel), over and over and over again.

Without thinking, you do it all ‘cause they make you do it, ‘til you can do it — blindfolded and backward — without thinking. And that’s OK because, remember, you were a savage. You were barely housebroken.  All this tedium, hammered into your metabolism by the earthly emissaries of God — reinforced by the crimson specter of eternal damnation, civilizes you. You reconcile yourself to the fact, through the wrath of Sister Mary Ann, that you really can’t — ever again for the rest of your life — do whatever you feel like doing at the moment you feel like doing it.

“So, you’re civilized, kid. Look at yourself! It’s obvious,” I was tempted to say to this teenager on the street. “You’re not just well-trained and polite, kid. You know what else you are? You’re moral. Because every faith, kid, even the Mormons (but with the possible exception of Scientology), has pretty much the same deck of do’s and don’ts. The only reason any faith works, kid, is because it’s about compassion. Listen to a priest, a rabbi, an imam, a patriarch, a shaman, whatever. You’ll have to sit through all kinds of sanctimonious drivel but sooner or later they’re all gonna get around — they can’t avoid it, kid — to a simple message. In the eyes of God, we are all the same. You lift me, you lift yourself. You treat me like scum, you become scum.”

I had this urge to tell the kid that the best part of every faith is the stories that illuminate this one unifying truth. I always liked the chapter from John where Jesus gets down on his knees and washes the feet of all his disciples, none of whom can figure out what the hell’s got into his head this time, and he says, “the servant is not greater than his lord; neither he that is sent greater than he that sent him.”

“Look, kid,” I was tempted to tell the young Hasid. “All it comes down to — all those years in school, all those lessons and sermons and prayers — is good manners and compassion. At St. Mary’s, they made me memorize the whole Baltimore Catechism before I was out of fourth grade. I’ve forgotten every word, but I haven’t forgotten Jesus crawling on his knees in front of his disciples, washing feet.

“In other words, kid, I got the point. Once you’ve got the point, you’re done. You can graduate. Lose the costume, toss the beads into a drawer, put the holy book on the shelf and go out there among the English. I mean, you can still do church, but it won’t make you any better than you already are. It won’t get you any closer to God because wherever he is — or isn’t — he’s just as close to everybody. For God, that’s the point.

“Besides, kid, there’s danger in going to church, or temple, or hitting the mosque every Friday like clockwork. Church is where you could mix with bad company and not even know it. Churches draw — like flies — the sort of people who think they’re more moral and holy than the next guy, closer to God because they keep up the rituals, pray the prayers, fiddle with the beads and strut their stuff in the presence of the Lord. Hang with these shmucks long enough and pretty soon you forget that moral is moral, that it can’t be super-sized, can’t be divvied up and passed around. It just is, or it isn’t, and it has nothing to do with outbursts of piety, which Jesus said you should treat like a bowel movement: ‘When you pray, go into your room and shut the door.’”

Of course, my urge to accost was a passing fancy. I let the boy go by. Never said a word. After all, who am I to preach to anybody about what’s moral and what’s not? I should know this? And even if I knew, I should ruin somebody else’s New Year’s Day with it?