Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bible! Read online
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Published in Penguin Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2009. Simultaneously published in the United States by Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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Copyright © Jonathan Goldstein, 2009
Some of these stories were previously broadcast or published in slightly different form as follows: “Adam and Eve,” “Cain and Abel,” and “My Troubles” on This American Life; “The Tower of Babel,” “Noah’s Ark,” “The Golden Calf,” and “King David,” parts one and two, on CBC Radio’s WireTap; “Samson and Delilah” in The Walrus magazine.
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Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Manufactured in Canada
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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Goldstein, Jonathan, 1969-
Ladies and gentlemen, the Bible! / Jonathan Goldstein.
ISBN 978-0-14-305654-6
1. Bible--History of Biblical events--Fiction. I. Title.
PS8563.O82846 L33 2009 C813’.6 C2009-900465-8
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American Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data available
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ALSO BY JONATHAN GOLDSTEIN
Lenny Bruce Is Dead
For Heather
And in memory of my grandparents:
Bookie, Lily, Moe, and Sam
Contents
Preface: Inside the Grey Derby
Adam and Eve
Cain and Abel
Noah and the Ark
The Tower of Babel
Jacob and Esau
The Golden Calf
Samson and Delilah
King David
Part I: Goliath
Part II: Bathsheba
Part III: Absalom
Jonah and the Big Fish
My Troubles (A Work in Progress, by Joseph of N—)
Ladies and Gentlemen,
THE BIBLE!
PREFACE
Inside the Grey Derby
By anyone’s standard their family was Jewish, but they played by their own rules. While they did not keep the Sabbath, they did go to synagogue on Yom Kippur. They begged God to forgive their sins and inscribe them in the Book of Life. They did so while glancing at their watches every ten minutes. They did not speak Hebrew, but they did toss around a few Yiddish words, half of which were made up, such as the grandmother’s word for the TV remote, something she called “der pushkeh.” They did not study Torah, but they did watch The Ten Commandments every year on TV. Even when the long journey through the desert became unendurable, they stuck it out. They believed enough for that.
There were certain restaurants they went to, not because they were kosher, but because they were “kosher-style.” Kosher-style was like the apartment across the hall from kosher, and whereas keeping kosher required rigorous observation of rules, keeping kosher-style required only a Jerusalem napkin holder on the table and the restaurant’s name written out front in large Hebraic calligraphy.
Growing up, there was a restaurant they went to on Friday nights. It was called the Grey Derby and among the Jews of their town it was very popular. More popular than other kosher-style restaurants like Schneider’s— essentially a living room with a cash register where one learned it was time to go when Mr. Schneider walked out of the bathroom in his boxer shorts, a toothbrush in his mouth. The other competitor was Spaghettiville, a basement operation they never went to, assuming it to be like Margaritaville, but with spaghetti.
They were a big group—a large family of uncles, aunts, great-aunts, sons-in-law, and a man named Goldberg whom no one was sure how they knew, and the Derby was their place. Never mind it was so crowded on Friday nights that you were guaranteed a half-hour wait—and never mind it wasn’t even a line you waited in. They were crammed into a kind of holding cell at the entrance, shoulder to shoulder, becoming impossibly, ferociously—supernaturally—hungry, the waft of veal and kishke slowly driving them mad.
They always got the same table—a long one in back, by the bathrooms. Once seated, they started in on whatever was left over by the previous diners.
“They hardly even touched the challah rolls,” the mother would say, looking around for leftover chopped liver to spread.
It didn’t take them more than ten minutes to devour their own weight in boiled chickens, stewed chickens, chickens in baskets, flanken, kishke, and a spicy fat called “speck” that has since been made illegal. Then they were on to the next event: the check. They were not a family disposed to acts of athleticism, but the fight for the bill was, for them, a kind of spiritual-emotional sport.
“I swore on my life I’d pay,” the mother would say and, quick like a cat, she’d claw the bill from the table and stick it down her blouse. Swearing upon her own life was a big move of the mother’s in those days. To her way of thinking it allowed the grandfather to know in no uncertain terms that should he pay, God would strike his daughter dead in the parking lot. Still, her oath did not keep the uncle, a man named Nat, from reaching into the neck of the mother’s shirt while yelling, “It’s a man’s privilege.”
Their table sat below a wall-length mural of David in the midst of slaying Goliath—the moment the rock was colliding with Goliath’s forehead. That was their backdrop—Goliath going down. It was of pretty amateurish quality, probably painted by one of the owner’s kids, but there was something about it that captured the young son’s imagination. As he sat there nibbling bowling ball–sized verenikas, he gazed, self-satisfied, at the ultimate image of the little-Jew-who-could.
Reclining back into their booth, their belt buckles undone, and their braggadocio about how much they’d eaten fading into silence, the young boy stared up at the mural, and subjected his father to a barrage of questions. It was always the same: How old was David when he slew Goliath? How much
did God help him slay Goliath? When it comes to slaying, why use a sling?
The father listened attentively, easing back farther into his seat. Were he a smoker, he would have lit his pipe with a thoughtful look on his face, but as he was not a smoker, he picked his teeth with a salad fork.
“David was no older than you are,” he said, “but even at such a young age, the kid had a sense of show-manship. Sure, he could have snuck into Goliath’s tent and brained the sleeping giant with some heavy piece of ancient pottery, but where’s the glory in that? No, the Jew’s way is to give things a little razzle-dazzle—to give the angels something to talk about. Now the sling had just been invented and most people were put off by its newness, preferring the old-fashioned ways of murdering—a stab to the stomach, a bludgeon to the skull. But not the Jews. We were always a nation of early adapters. Monotheism. Liquid soap. We shrug our shoulders and say, ‘why not?’ and it is that shoulder-shrugging spirit that’s helped us survive.”
The father was not a religious man. Aside from once trying to teach the boy the Hebrew alphabet through rhyme—“Aleph, bais, give me a raise. Ress, tess, kiss my ess”—and trying to get the boy to start calling him Tateh after having just watched Fiddler on the Roof, Yiddishkeit just wasn’t his thing. He was never one for synagogue, complaining about the hard wooden pews, the incomprehensibility of the Hebrew language, and the way that synagogue, rather than inspiring him, made him feel as though he were being suffocated in a claustrophobic coffin that reeked of old-man smell.
But talking about the Bible was something else. Its heroes were like superheroes or Greek gods—but better yet, they had really existed. And not only that—they were even distant relatives! The father, who hadn’t even spoken to his own brother in years, took all of this in stride, but the boy did not. He couldn’t see how you could. He had hundreds of questions, and each one spawned more.
“Didn’t Goliath have friends to avenge his death?” he asked.
“What friends? Goliath was a bully and a blowhard,” the father said. “I’ve always imagined him as a giant version of that guy who used to share my desk at the insurance office. Ian something. Now David, he was a good kid, but he made mistakes and God had to teach him right from wrong—by smiting his children and such.”
In the father’s retellings, it often seemed that God was no friend to the Jews. Not like Nixon, whom the family still adored for having delivered bombs to Israel’s doorstep during the Yom Kippur War.
Staring up at the mural, he explained that, in those days, they beheaded vanquished giants. “But try putting a picture of that on a wall and you’ll have the Board of Health up your ass in two seconds.”
From David they veered into Genesis.
“Were there unicorns in Eden?” the boy asked.
“There were,” the father said, “but God had to kill them to punish man.” The father explained how, as an added penalty, “God commanded Adam and Eve to murder the unicorns themselves and so they wandered the Earth, strangling unicorns as they wept.”
“How horrible,” the boy said. “How could someone kill a unicorn—even if God told you to?”
“In the beginning, it was rough on them but they got used to it, making small talk as they strangled. In the end it actually brought them closer and helped their marriage. Don’t worry. God knows what he’s doing.”
From Genesis, they wound their way further back still, eventually arriving at the very beginning. Before the beginning. The beginning of everything—even God. It always struck the boy as a very commonsensical question: if God created everything, who created God? He didn’t understand why the question wasn’t foremost on everyone’s mind. On the very first page of the illustrated children’s Bible he had at home, God was already there. He would flip backward, to make sure he hadn’t missed anything, but there was only a table of contents. It crossed his mind that the pages dealing with that prebeginning might have fallen out. A lot of the pages were lost, so when he went to his grandparents’, he looked in their Bible—they kept it beside the phone book—but it was the same story: “In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.” No prequel. Nothing.
As the waiter began the arduous task of clearing the table of empty plates, glasses, oily napkin balls, and ashtrays filled with olive pits and tiny bones, the boy asked his father, “Who’s God’s god?”
“God is beyond time,” he said. “God created time. To ponder this too hard can drive the average man to insanity. Let us instead ponder dessert.” Complimentary lemon tea and coffee was brought forth with a tray of rice pudding and baked apples. The boy could not understand how anyone could eat when such huge questions hung in the air—though to be fair, he could also not understand how anyone could eat after having just ingested a barn’s worth of meat and chicken. How could someone invent time? That was like inventing dreaming or darkness.
“What was God doing all those millions of years just floating around all by himself in the nothingness all day?”
“He was lonely,” the father said. “He had no choice but to make us. Of course he didn’t get it right out the gate. It took a few tries.”
The father then went on to list the universes that preceded their own.
“Before this one, there were incomplete universes that did not please the Almighty. Some were too cluttered—with daybeds and piles of blankets all over the place making even the beach smell musty and close. Other universes of just one person—a man named Morris who sat in a room by himself, trying to decide whether to cuff his pants or let them drag. And can you imagine the delicate touch it took to create free will? No, I’m sure those early universes were filled with marionette people getting their strings tangled up in each other. Universes of tangled string! Universes of nothing but light! Universes that were perfect in every way but were missing the right support beams and so collapsed after only five seconds. But what a spectacular five seconds they might have been.”
Spotting a chicken wing bone, gnawed clean, poking out from under a place mat, he went on, inspired.
“Universes where bridges and buildings were made of chicken bones, but chicken bones did not come from chickens. They were grown from chicken bone seeds and chicken bone seeds came from boiling tears because tears tasted like chicken soup! Chicken soup came from chicken soup rain clouds and chicken soup rain coats were made of feathers and instead of carrying umbrellas people carried ladles.”
After a meal like that, how his father could even think of chicken—let alone conjure a universe of poultry— boggled the boy’s mind and made him slightly nauseous.
“So why didn’t God mention any of this in the preface?”
The father waved his hand. “Who reads prefaces? A person’s job on Earth is to make the best sense of things that he can. Not to give up and live like an animal, but not to get too hung up on the details. Look at the hamantasch.” A hamantasch was a prune-filled triangular cookie eaten on Purim and the father was often turning to it for guidance. “Depending on whose version you believe, it either symbolizes the evil Haman’s triangle-shaped hat or Haman’s dirty triangle-shaped ears. Either way, they go good with coffee.”
The idea of eating a pastry made to replicate the salient facial feature of a Jew-hating mass murderer struck the boy as sick—like eating a licorice Hitler mustache— but the father’s point had been made, though many years later when thinking back upon it, the boy would be hard-pressed to say what exactly that point was.
When the bill had been settled, their belt buckles refastened, and the younger sister awoken from under the table, they commenced their walk to the door, the grandfather shaking hands as he went, the uncle handing out business cards. At the entrance, they smiled with compassion at the new crowd of hungry Jews who awaited their turn, and in the parking lot they smoked cigars, chewed mints, jingled car keys, and got into political arguments that devolved into finger pointing, foot stomping, and the shouting of names like turkey, schmo, schmendrick, and schmegeggy. They enjoyed each othe
r’s company and took their time parting. After all, it was only five thirty and the whole night lay ahead.
Adam and Eve
In the beginning, when Adam was first created, he spent whole days rubbing his face in the grass. He picked his ear until it bled, tried to fit his fist in his mouth, and yanked out tufts of his own hair. At one point he tried to pinch his own eyes out in order to examine them and God had to step in.
Looking down at Adam, God must have felt a bit weird about the whole thing. It must have been something like eating at a cafeteria table all by yourself when a stranger suddenly sits down opposite you, but it is a stranger you have created, and he is eating a macaroni salad that you have also created, and you have been sitting at the table all by yourself for over a hundred billion years; and yet still, you have nothing to talk about.
It was pitiful the way Adam looked up into the sky and squinted.
Before He created Adam, God must have been lonely; now He was still lonely, and so was Adam.
Then came Eve.
Since the Garden of Eden was the very first village, and since every village needs a mayor as well as a village idiot, it broke down in this way: Eve: mayor; Adam: village idiot.
Sometimes, when Adam would start to speak, Eve would get all hopeful that he was about to impart something important and smart, but he would only say stuff like: “Little things are really great because you can put them in your hand as well as in your mouth.”