other words still an adolescent, and stretched to my limits. And even at those moments I didn’t think of “revelation”—in other words I knew all the time that the flickering figure was only a mirage—but I had a terrible need, and the need radiated out of me, and projected the figure out of the picture, where it twinkled and shone at me until it came about that I addressed it. “Make it be true,” I begged, and by true I meant me and Alek.
All kinds of alien words, alien wishes, whispered in me then. It embarrasses me to remember them now. I wished, with all my heart and soul, I wished for it to be “true” and “pure.” I asked to be “cleansed.” I asked to fall asleep and wake up bathed and washed in light, freeof the dross of speech and of buffoonery and of lies. I was ready to endure pain, to be scoured by it, and I begged for grace. The devil knows where I got all this from, but the yearning was so physical and absolute, and the tenderness flowed and ebbed and flowed from her so powerfully that I relaxed my knee and started to kneel. Yes, that’s exactly how it happened, that’s what I did: I relaxed one knee, sent the other one backwards, and I was on the point of kneeling in front of the icon when something grabbed me in the middle of the movement, sent a shiver of disgust through me, and made me stand up straight.
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 therest 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.
All kinds of alien words, alien wishes, whispered in me then. It embarrasses me to remember them now. I wished, with all my heart and soul, I wished for it to be “true” and “pure.” I asked to be “cleansed.” I asked to fall asleep and wake up bathed and washed in light, freeof the dross of speech and of buffoonery and of lies. I was ready to endure pain, to be scoured by it, and I begged for grace. The devil knows where I got all this from, but the yearning was so physical and absolute, and the tenderness flowed and ebbed and flowed from her so powerfully that I relaxed my knee and started to kneel. Yes, that’s exactly how it happened, that’s what I did: I relaxed one knee, sent the other one backwards, and I was on the point of kneeling in front of the icon when something grabbed me in the middle of the movement, sent a shiver of disgust through me, and made me stand up straight.
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 therest 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.
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