Every Jew in the world needs to read Foreskin's Lament by Shalom Auslander - most Jews seem to have already... If you know people who went to synagogue, you could be forgiven for thinking its readers experienced an earthquake in the middle of the service. Jews talked about it every day for years, like a bug bite that itched more every time they scratched it.
What was the problem? What's the problem of any memoir? It spilled dirt. It aired dirty laundry. It told tales of people's misbehavior and said in no uncertain terms everything parents did, teachers did, student peers did. From one point of view, it could be seen as a terrible betrayal and humiliation of people who love the author - all the moreso fifteen years ago when books like this were much rarer. From another point of view, a more common point of view now than in 2007, it could be seen as a necessary airing of abusers' bad behavior. From a third point of view, one people only pay lip service to having, it's an examination of how a belief system that demands complete control over your life damages its practitioners irrevocably. Every member of the system is a tortured captive, and the only way to stop being tormented is to be the tormenter. Like all organizations that demand holding its hostages to impossible standards of human behavior, it cannot help but encourage humiliation, delusion, assault, and disobedience. If we truly believed in systemic injustice rather than individual villains, we wouldn't be so quick to publish about them because we'd be too busy learning about how to best apply systemic reform so that other exploiters of people don't step into the systemic vacuum they leave. But that hasn't happened because the human mind believes more in revenge than in solutions, and the best evidence is religion's continued hold over us.
For those of the non-Ira Glass crowd who've never heard of Shalom Auslander, Foreskin's Lament is a merciless memoir of growing up in the Orthodox Jewish world. It tells of exactly how the impossible standards of Judaism enable abuse, mental illness, shame; and not just Judaism, but religion itself. It's horrifying, moving, and all the more shocking because it's one of the funniest books of the 21st century.
If it was just a juvenile humiliation of his family, it wouldn't have been published, if it only implicated his community, we'd move on, if it only implicated the Orthodox Jewish world, Jews could have shrugged, but it doesn't stop there... It implicates us all. Orthodox and reformed, Jews and Christians, goyim and apikorsim. Is it unfair? Well... a little, but it's unfairness is earned, and it's nowhere near as unfair as its critics allege.
There's nothing in the book that should be a surprise. Is anyone really surprised that that Orthodox Jews with the slightest doubts are pre-emptively ostracized? Or that Orthodox teachers' most reliable techniques are shame and corporal? Or that some orthodox men beat the shit out of their sons? Or that class bullies enact tortures as horrifying as in any prison? The point of the book is not that Auslander's childhood experience was typical of Orthodox Jews, his childhood is still roughly the average world childhood, the point of the book is that religion, the supposed consolation that makes us all act kinder to each other, was enforced as a means of making sure that his tormentors could keep tormenting him. When you learn so early that your world is so structured against happiness, the only surprise is that the vast majority don't rebel too.
Most importantly, this book is a love letter to sin: slim jims, swear words, McDonald's cheeseburgers, porno magazines, walkmans, shoplifting, weed, Pontiac Trans-Ams, art galleries, freedom of choice, and putting a note saying 'Dear God, Fuck You' in the Western Wall.
It clearly implicates us all in the slave-trade that is religion, and maybe that's unfair, but religion IS a medieval holdover. It DOES encourage insanity and lies and harm and shame. It allows an omniscient being an eternal parking pass in our brain's longterm lot - and once He's there, He's not leaving. It's rarely ever the thoughts of His love and mercy that fill our minds: it's His blackmail of us with unfathomably eternal pain, a blackmail that is so much more effective than any love He offers. As Christopher Hitchens so memorably likened it (quoting verbatim), religion is a 'celestial North Korea' in which an omnipotent being demands that every moment of your existence on earth is devoted to his praise on pain of the most horrific punishments; but at least North Korea ends with death. God demands praise for all eternity.
So if I'm still slightly religious, it's because nobody has yet come up with a better idea to keep us from killing each other. Religion is medieval because human beings are medieval, and we're not progressing any time soon. Material science was supposed to free us from mental slavery, but look at the internet: every bit of progress finds a new way to fuck us up. At least with religion, there's a small chance to find something better in a world to come. That small possibility is the reason I stay religious.
That and the God-blackmail.... it got me too... badly...
As far as the religious go, my family was not bad; a kosher house but we still ate beef and chicken at any restaurant we wanted. We went to Shul a couple Shabbeses a month, but we didn't go 'religiously' and my parents seemed to prefer that I go out into the hall and goof off with friends who never liked me than boredly disrupt the service. Friday night dinner was mandatory at my grandparents' house, except for when we had Symphony tickets, which caused a series of rows between parents and grandparents.
Any kid would find religious obligation boring which their parents don't condition them to believe in, but it was ultimately rather mild stuff, and it was not out of any great belief that we kept doing it. We were a family from 'survivors', and whether we liked it or not (there were plenty moments when I didn't...) the burden to keep things going fell on us. My brothers and I were instructed very early that being Jewish is not a choice, and whether we view ourselves as Jewish, the world always will. It was a constant message enforced at home, at Jewish Day School, sometimes even at summer camps. After nearly 40 very Jewy years on Earth, it's harder to disagree with that assessment than it used to be. Still, I think we'd all have been somewhat happier with more choice in the matter... And I confess that there are two things about our religious observance that were destructive. One's amusing, the other infuriating.
Don't believe any Jew who tells you that Jews don't think we're better than you. We totally do. We can't help it. Jingoism about our intelligence is flourided into our seltzer. Look at how many Nobel Prizes per capita we have, look at how many billionaires, look at how many celebrities and politicians and famous intellectuals, now look at how many you have (blows raspberry). The vast majority of Jewsh holidays are devoted to commemorating all the times you tried to kill us all, but we were too smart for you to pull it off (second raspberry). My parents are very bright, the average person isn't, and like most Jews, my parents internalized their intelligence in a way that's self-congratulatory (and clearly passed on to their oldest son... third raspberry...). They believe, and in my heart of hearts I suppose I still do too, that the average Jew is brighter than the average gentile, and to them, that justifies believing that Jews should only live among other Jews, should only marry other Jews, should only be close friends with other Jews. As far as bigotry goes, it's not that bad... but unlike my parents, most Jews are not that bright, and neither they nor I have figured out what most of the brightest American Jews figured out long ago - that their best chance for happiness was outside the religion. Look at all those Nobel Prize winners and celebrities. Most of them married shiksas and their descendants' religion is NPR or crossfit. Being Jewish is a state of lifelong irritation at each other in the good moments, persecution and mass slaughter in the bad ones. Anybody smart enough figured out by 1950 that the path to happiness is to get out, assimilate your family, and hope nobody remembers your descendants' Jewish ancestors by the time of the next Shoah.
And that leads to the other, infuriating gripe: being told, many times, that I was a perpetuator of Jewish death because I wanted to stop speaking Yiddish... I was four years old when this happened, and it was the refrain of my childhood. In my mid 30s my uncle was still bringing it up. But at least my infant rebellion seemed to spare my younger brothers that particular experience of feeling completely different from everybody they knew... They never went to school worried they couldn't communicate with the other students, and let's face it, my English is clearly a little weird even now...
But there was the simple problem that I was.... different... quite different... and the differences were only becoming more pronounced as I grew.
I've always wondered if half my brain was wired in Yiddish, and when I made an effort to forget most of my Yiddish, I lost my organizational ability, time management, fine motor coordination, logical thinking, ability to plan ahead, and the ability to get through any activity at all without bodily tics. God already knew the filth I was and was punishing me when I was four...
I'm not going to go through 'deh meiceh' again: the brilliant kid (illui) who woke up one day, found out he was an idiot, humiliated for it by teachers and students both, went crazy from the disgrace, became a violent maniac in his early teen years, lives forever with shameful flashbacks to misdeeds every day, misdeeds doctors think never happened (but God knows better, doesn't he?...), and sentenced to a life imprisonment within humiliating limitations which nobody ever believes until they see them, and rather than react with compassion, they inevitably go as batty as he when they have to deal with his limitations which half of them think he's faking.
And I'm not going to go through 'deh andereh meiceh' again, about getting manipulated and lied to by a guidance counselor into going to a school for 'character education' that was a cult. Stuck for three years in a place that demanded as much access to your thoughts as any angry god on punishments of daily physical torture and public humiliation, during which the pressure mounted in the mind of this once insufferable teen atheist until delusions of God's personal interference in every decision of his life began; delusions which have been described by professionals as everything from extreme "Pure O" (obsession) to Schizotypal Personality Disorder, obsessions to which he can still only pay fealty at every moment, even as he types.
And in all these confessional essays, I have never truly set to paper the nature of these delusional obsessions, and I still find it much too painful to set them down this time in anything but outline, but suffice to say, when Shalom Auslander described his own thought processes of dealing with a perpetually pissed off deity, I realized how common my experience is - just like my experience of Yiddish, it's only atypical for non-fanatics. I have rarely ever made a decision in my adult life that was truly my own. Every decision I make is affected by a labyrinthine system of weighing consequences of my chances of punishment through numerology, color scheme, the direction of traffic and wind, the things I hear people say in the street or on televsion, the texture of nearby inanimate objects and their holes and cracks, and the various tics I allow myself to perform... Much of this has been worked up in a system I could easily write out. I'm amazed I have any mental space left over to write anything else...
The chance for a decent life was over for me so early. I was a screwup and a rebel before I even had a chance to deliberately screw up. All I ever wanted was to be the 'nice Jewish boy' nobody ever thought I was, prizing the approval of the very types of people who have never, will never, grant it.
I seem to have emerged as fully formed as Athena. Fully adult as a toddler, yet unable to grow up at any age. It's the ultimate cosmic joke: the nice and smart Jewish boy who's a cross to bear and can be neither smart nor nice. Who could undergo that and not see the hand of a vengeful god? And so I grew convinced that all through those early years of humiliation, God was biding his time, waiting to see if Evan Tucker would ever be the 'Nice Jewish Boy' again, and when that clearly wasn't the direction I was trending, He issued His eternal punishment, His lifelong voice in my head, commanding me atonement at every minute of every day until death and well beyond.
I was so far gone by high school that I never even got my opportunity to rebel against the types of people from whom rebellion is so amply deserved, and I confess, to this day I feel incredibly cheated. I ended up at a second high school where the vast majority had rebelled too much, and here I was grouped with them, bullied by them, but never experiencing the highs they experienced before encountering that school's lows. I never got my chance to figure out if I was truly a theater kid, mathlete, band dork, gamer, emo or stoner. I never had my chance to drive drunk with a group of friends into a Denny's parking lot at 4 in the morning, have awkward teen sex with a pimply girl wearing an inch and a half of caked foundation, smoke cigarettes in a public school bathroom with kids who beat me up last week, or figure out what the big deal was about Blink 182. And of course, as a teen, the only love a kid like me ever experienced was unrequited.
Nobody actually LIKES adolescence, but normality has its consolations, and the biggest consolation is the ability to rebel against it; to experience that sensation of 'pure being,' even if illusory, which grows teens to the realization that their spirit may be infinite, unconquerable and ungovernable - and until time wears them down, that's exactly what they all are. The consolation of adolescence is that feeling of freedom all teenagers have that they can do literally anything, experience any amount of enjoyment, be any kind of person they want to be; and even if they eventually learn that that's bullshit, there's nothing bullshit about it when you're a teen. The sensation of freedom is the most crucial part of growing into an adult. It energizes the will to create a future for yourself, and without that illusion, what reserve of morale is there later to do anything at all?
I feel like this essay needs a final third but I have no idea what it is... Perhaps revisited in the PM...
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