The Best American Essays 2016 Part 14

We turn onto a few dirt roads, thinking we'll pull over, but they deliver us to someone's house. We turn back. We try again. We coast one rise after another, trying to calculate the likelihood of traffic. The car chatters over washboard. The main thing is, we don't want to get arrested.

He is my first married man, or the first I have actually f.u.c.ked. The others, professors and postdocs in the earth sciences, caught me at a particularly tender time, when I craved partners.h.i.+p and love too much. We went on long, meandering dates, sometimes awkward, in which I drank Irish coffees late at night and tried to decide whether or not there was chemistry as the men scooted closer to me near the bar. And if there was chemistry, I had to ask myself if I could swallow the fact of the wives. Sometimes I could not.

You understand, to connect to them too much was dangerous. They were married men. I build dikes around the edges of my own desire, to direct the waters: these suitable candidates for love, these not. The ideal was always that someone would be Such A Good Friend while also containing some disqualifying factor. Something to steady the heart. The ideal was that once the dynamics were established, I wouldn't have to worry about things growing in the wrong direction.

More often, though, I allowed myself to sleep with men for whom I felt just the right level of contempt. Some combination of flaring arousal and disgust. Men with whom I could chat enough, men with whom I could laugh enough. Men about whom I could say, "Of course not!" to my friends, and still f.u.c.k the s.h.i.+t out of them.

Contempt is not a word we like. Contempt means disregard for, disrespect for. Contempt finds one beneath consideration. Contempt finds one deserving of scorn.

To act out of contempt initially inspired self-loathing, a warm, sickening rush of shame. Even as someone leaned in to kiss me, I was dismissing them, and this seemed unforgivable, I think because I bought into the idea that there are only two kinds of relations.h.i.+ps in this world: those grounded in a sort of perfect love and those that are not (that should, accordingly, be disbanded immediately, or hastily cleaned up, atoned for).

Now I see that even my friends.h.i.+ps contain moments of distance. I do not mean to say that the contempt we contain, which flares in us, need always be visible to others or acted upon, but I do know that its existence can be of use. The kind of contempt I am praising is but a sliver, a powerful small thing, which holds a s.p.a.ce, preventing inappropriate enmeshment. (Too much contempt, of course, and one simply does not call.) These men too dismiss me. If our relations.h.i.+p is to be just s.e.x, they necessarily must acknowledge what I am not. Contempt is a marker of the kind of situation where such a delicate balance is possible. If not the foggy risk of love, the creeping risk of hate. In a body such as mine-insistent, hungry, clear in its requests-if I am to have s.e.x more than once a year, I will inevitably be confronting one or the other of these potential imbalances.

What is easy to forget is the way bodies grow tenderness. We like to think that humans arrive at a kiss only when tenderness is already present, grown from emotional encounters or situational closeness. But in fact a kiss can grow tenderness, as though from a seed. Do not confuse the presence of contempt with the absence of kindness. With men like this one, especially. The tenderness of the body calms my reactivity toward him. It draws a kind of sweetness out of us, it builds an intimacy from our very tissues. From the touch of mouth to neck, from hand to hip. We lie together afterward, leg over leg, and laugh about small things, relieved, drawn into mutual sweetness.

We f.u.c.k with a tender contempt. Or we f.u.c.k tenderly, and contempt mediates.

We climb over a rise, and then, what I want to see: a Forest Service sign. I have a right, like any American, to f.u.c.k on public land. I pull the car over. Its front faces a ranch with a big two-story cabin-style house. He seems nervous. I am thrilled.

I'd pictured us making out outside the car in the wind, to build more heat, but he wants to get right into the hatchback. I acquiesce, stepping out of my cowboy boots, spreading the blanket onto the scratchy gray floor of the folded-down seats.

I lean down, to slip open his b.u.t.tons with both hands and mouth.

He f.u.c.ks me in the hatchback. It has to be a hundred degrees in there, the sun pouring through the windows. Sweat pools in gray drops on his forehead. Only one falls on me before he brushes them away with the back of his hand. Our bodies slide around on each other. I hold his hips against me. Finally his face clenches. It is over. The windows of the car are fogged. "Like t.i.tanic," I say, moving like I'll run my hand down the wet window, and he rolls his eyes.

"If you'd said that during, I'd have killed you."

We crack the doors. Fresh, cool wind pours over our bodies. We are dry in moments.

"It's so nice not to have to put in extra effort," he says as we drive back to town. And I laugh.

"Yes," I say. He puts his hand on my thigh.

I could have used an o.r.g.a.s.m, but I don't actually care. I'm leaving the country at the end of the week; his training will end, and he'll move to Seattle. I suspect we'll never see each other again. I love that this does not concern me.

On the way home, I buy jalapeo chips at the Sh.e.l.l station and crunch loudly on them while I drive. I lick my fingers and absorb the salt. I feel delicious. I feel amazing. The whole valley is coated in perfect desert light, the high rolling hills covered in a white sheen.

GEORGE STEINER.

The Eleventh Commandment.

FROM Salmagundi.

The eminent logician W.V.O. Quine invoked "blameless intuitions." Such are the best I can offer.

Hostility to Jews, or Jew-hatred, is as ancient as Judaism itself. The oppression of Jews, attempts to ostracize them from prevailing society long predate the a.n.a.lysis in Josephus's Contra Apionem. Contempt, hatred, violence against Jews and Jewish communities never cease. Can we spell out some of their invariants?

The origins of monotheism are manifold and hybrid. They direct us to the solar cult in the Egypt of Akhnaton; to the ironic speculations of Xenophanes (if cattle had a G.o.d he would wear horns). Diversities of monotheism can be made out at diverse points and legacies in the ancient Middle East, in Iranian pieties. Within Judaism the adoption of any strict monotheism is gradual and marked by mutinous reversions to archaic pluralities. There are "sons of G.o.d" and manifest traces of polytheism in the Psalms. Local, tribal sanctuaries long persist. The Prophets engage them in fierce polemics. Relapse into idol-wors.h.i.+p and pagan sacrificial rites is a perennial threat.

Paradoxically, it is with the loss of secular power and the destruction of the Temple that a rigorous monotheism a.s.serts itself. This a.s.sertion entails a singular, unsparing exigence of abstraction. It posits a deity which prohibits any iconic figuration. There is to be no imagining of G.o.d in any incarnate or mimetic forms. His internalized presence is as blank as the desert air. Ethical imperatives are not conceptualizations of divinity, but footnotes to His inconceivable "thereness." He "is what he is," insubstantial as is the fire in the Bush.

These prescriptions challenge, indeed contradict, deep-lying, as it were, organic impulses and needs in the human psyche. Common man feeds on representations, as Schopenhauer taught; understanding seeks out the concrete. The imperious negations in Jewish monotheism have been known to elicit repulsion, indeed terror, in the gentile. There is something radically human in Pompey's revulsion when he confronts the total emptiness of the Holy of Holies. Christological trinitarianism, the teeming Christian iconographies of the G.o.d-family, the legions of saints and graphic relics embody a vehement dissent from authentic monotheism. They people the imagined reaches of eternity. As Nietzsche noted, the pagan world and its h.e.l.lenistic-Christian derivatives crowd nature-the nymphs in the brook, the elves in the forest-with benign or demonic presences. These are busy in the everyday. Judaism leaves man almost monstrously alone in the face, not to be imaged or conceived of, of a Deity, of an absent immediacy which has had no personalized meeting with G.o.d since Baruch.

One asks: do certain constants in Jewish moral and intellectual history relate to this vexing apprentices.h.i.+p of abstraction, of abstention from the iconic? These are eminently manifest in Spinoza. In the wholly disproportionate contribution of Jewish thinkers to modern mathematical logic, to set-theory, to mastery in chess. Do they have affinities to the development of atonal and twelve-tone music? Schoenberg's idiom seems peculiarly apposite to the central definition of the Almighty in Moses und Aron: "unimaginable, inconceivable, invisible." Consider Kafka's resort to the silence of the sirens or Wittgenstein's celebrated injunction at the close of the Tractatus invoking a necessary silence in respect "of that of which one cannot speak."

The h.e.l.l of the concentration camps defies linguistic means of description and comprehension. The systematic torture and elimination of millions renders somehow obscene the pretense to a verbalized epilogue. Even the mourning which comes closest-that of Paul Celan, of Lanzmann-falls short of the incommensurable. Horror is, or should be, struck speechless. Can one "think" the Shoah, where "thought" inescapably is concomitant with articulation, even entirely inward? There may therefore be contiguities-how could it be otherwise?-between the incommunicable "zero at the bone" which is Auschwitz and the legacy of abstraction, the inspired nihilism at the bitter core of Sinaitic monotheism. Have such contiguities scandalized and provoked?

A second motive of detestation, doc.u.mented in antiquity, is Judaism's claim, already Abrahamic, to the status of a "chosen people." In the liberal West, Jewish fears and profane ec.u.menism have queried, debated, attenuated the meaning of such divine predilection. Ought it not to signify "a people chosen to suffer," to be a witness unto G.o.d's universal regard for all men and women? But despite such a pacifying gloss and such apologetic good sense, the archaic postulate of uniqueness, of a neighborhood to G.o.d more proximate than that allowed to any other ethnic community, persists. It hammers away beneath a rationalist, even humorous surface (Ronald Knox's "How odd of G.o.d/To choose the Jews"). The claim has never ceased to infuriate non-Jews. In the genesis of n.a.z.ism it triggered homicidal imitation and parody. Today the allegories of election are operative in the aspirations to divinely underwritten promises of homecoming and territorial sovereignty instrumental to Zionism. Add to this the tradition whereby the dying Moses asks G.o.d that henceforth the divine epiphany should be granted solely to Israelites. Contested by Amos, this plea for uniqueness is reiterated in such apocrypha as the influential Testament of Job. "Let intimacy with transcendence be ours alone." An awesome arrogance can be inferred.

The persona of Judas crystallizes but by no means initiates the millennial a.s.sociation, charged with both panic and contempt, between the Jew and money. The primal ambiguity of money-key to happiness, root of all evil, at once blessed and satanic-is virtually universal in social perceptions and symbolism. Even rationalized, money retains its demonic aura. The sensibility, the history of the Jew are taken to be inextricably inwoven with that of wealth, with Mammon and the Golden Calf, with Shylock and Rothschild. Those thirty pieces of silver, emblematic of Judas's treason, modulate into the Christian enforcement on the Jew of the sin, of the corrosions of usury (so formidably chanted in Ezra Pound's Usura canto). The Jew is compelled to "make money," a loaded phrase. The yield is simultaneously precious and excremental, as psychoa.n.a.lysis seeks to explain. Moneylender and alchemist, the Jew manipulates, masters, fructifies the occult yet also supreme rationale and functions of money as does no other ethnic community. With the instauration of modern capitalism, of investment finance and the money markets, literature will quicken atavistic fears into profane urgency: witness the role of the Jew in Balzac, in Trollope, in Zola's L'Argent. On the a.n.a.lytic front, econometrics, the n.o.bel in economics are all but a Jewish reserve.

Observe the deranged contradiction: Jew-hatred is directed at both the Bolshevik and the capitalist! The Jew is seen (justly) to play a leading part in utopian socialism, in the vengeful rejection of unequal riches and monetary values which gives to Marxism, to Marxism-Leninism their prophetic, messianic charisma. Their promise that "gold will be used for toilet seats." On the other hand, Wall Street, the esoteric juggleries of high finance, the bourse are stigmatized as expressions of Jewish plutocracy. They are distinctive of the Jew as Marx, himself a Jew, proclaimed. How can anti-Semitism have it both ways? No defiance of logic, no schizophrenia takes us nearer the absurd, irrational, but also entrenched, visceral sources and substance of Jew-hatred than does this simultaneous mechanism. In the outpourings of libel and caricature, the Jew is both the "bloodthirsty Red" and the pinstriped mogul.

Dispersed or confined to the ghetto, despised and subject to violent persecution, be it under Domitian, in the medieval Rhineland, in the Spain of the Inquisition, in the Russian pogroms and, apocalyptically, during the Shoah, the Jews have continued to exercise on the gentile world an unsettling, exasperating moral pressure. It is the blackmail of the ideal.

I have already adverted to the overwhelming, counterintuitive, perhaps in some sense unnatural exactions which Mosaic monotheism would impose on human reflexes and feelings. Christian polytheism, the compromises engaging the "Son of Man," the Man-G.o.d, have never effaced certain deep fissures and tensions within Christianity itself. The reproachful specter of genuine monotheism stalks the canonic multiplicities of Christian doctrine. It surfaces in such hybrids as strict Calvinism, Jansenism, and the Unitarian arrangement. It resounds in Pascal's agonized appeal to "the G.o.d of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob." The refusal of the Jew to partic.i.p.ate in such mythologies makes a hostage of Christianity "unto the end of time," for there can be no Second Coming so long as the Jew does not enter freely into the ecclesia.

Next came the uncompromising imperatives of Sinai and the Decalogue. Commandments out of common reach and the norm of human conduct. We are to cherish our neighbor more than ourselves. Smitten, we are to offer the other cheek. We are to forgive whatever injury is done to us. We must share our portion of worldly goods. Directly inspired by the Mosaic precedent, by the psalms and the prophets, Jesus is no more thoroughly the Jew than in his Sermon on the Mount. He affronts man-this is the right word-with behavioral criteria and ideals far beyond natural instincts and the resources of spirit in everyman. The Galilean propounds axioms of caritas, of mutual altruism, of disinterested love and agape, the key Pauline rubric, which only the sanctified, the "latter-day saints," can hope to enact. Who can satisfy the Pascalian ordinance that "the self is hateful" rephrased in Levinas's Talmudic exaltation of the primacy of "the other"? But in excess of our means these prescriptions plague us with their unattainable value. Perfection as blackmail. The necessary hypocrisies, the mundane bargains, the gymnastics of absolution and self-forgiveness by which women and men conduct their private and civic affairs are encoded by the most adroit public relations virtuoso in history: by Paul of Tarsus. From whose tactics of grace and dispensation the Jew-hatred in Christianity takes its lasting, theologically b.u.t.tressed contagion.

I have already referred to the third major indictment of average humanity: that formulated by utopian, messianic modes of socialism, especially Marxist. The abolition of private property, the promise of equality, the exchange not of money but of trust for trust promulgated in Karl Marx's 1843 program are rooted in Judaic aspirations, in what one might call the left wing of the prophetic inheritance. The territorial, proprietary, privately oriented motivations of the "human animal," la bte humaine, do not only counteract these Edenic prescriptions. They do not only inspire fear and insurgence. They bequeath a toxic residue of guilt. No one fuels more detestation than one whose exemplary ideals we acknowledge, inwardly, to be justified but feel ourselves incapable of matching. (I know that there are spare rooms in my privileged house, but do not share them.) The Mosaic summons, the witness of the seer from Nazareth, the exigencies of messianic socialism (as codified in certain fundamentalist kibbutzim)-three variants on the Judaic demands for perfection. On the didactic absolutism of altruistic merit, our instincts and pragmatic resources are found wanting. Hence millennia of resentment and enmity. All of which Adolf Hitler summarized succinctly in one of his reported table-talks: "The Jew has invented conscience."

And yet he endures. There are today more Jews thought to be alive on the planet than there were prior to the Shoah. If this is indeed so, it is a scandal (in the grave sense of Greek skandalon), an enormity difficult to grasp. Out of homicidal decimation, like no other in history, out of an explicit, systematic death sentence emerges not only a ghostly remnant of survivors but the contested land of Israel and the good fortune of North American Judaism. Jews have returned to Berlin. There is probably no way of gauging the psychic damage done, the scars left. The Jew, descendant of measureless hurt. He may harbor within him a covert derangement. But he is, and that existential ba.n.a.lity defies likelihood and horror.

Allow a simple thought-experiment. Take an ancient people with a complex language; with a coherent social-political fabric; an evolved ritual-religious practice; a favored rural and urban habitat; artifacts and art of high quality. What is left of the Etruscans? A handful of archaeological vestiges and sepulchral sites. Why no modern heirs to the Etruscans?

The same effacement is true of countless historically attested civilizations and ethnic ident.i.ties. Some, as in Central America, lasted a thousand years and left behind resplendent monuments, alphabets, cosmologies. The utter genius of ancient Greece, the power of imperial Rome, the aesthetic, political constructs of Byzantium enter into eclipse, then persist in the atrophy of the museum. Is there anything more instinct with death than the Elgin marbles?

We bear witness to two exceptions only. To only two lineages of unbroken selfhood over more than 3,000 years. In the case of the Chinese, demography (vast numbers) and the absence of genocidal visitations from abroad have secured continuity.

The case of the Jews is sui generis. It is that of a scattered, numerically limited people, victimized by recurrent persecution and, at the last, by a systematic industry of annulment (Stalinism conjoins n.a.z.ism). Dying, an American publicist posed the stark question: if you intuit another ma.s.s murder, would you choose not to have children or do everything practicable to bring about their exit from Judaism? Each Jewish parent must answer. If she and he reject the alternative, what ontological luxury are they enacting?

Still, the Jew insists on being. With an unexamined, nonnegotiable tactlessness of soul. He is the anti-Hamlet par excellence: "not to be" is not an option. Suicide is a blasphemy inflicted from, as it were, without (in mortal danger as at Masada, in medieval ghettos lit alight by the hounding mob).

Is the ultimate source of Jew-hatred, of the enduring plague of anti-Semitism, the provocative wonder of Judaism's persistence? Of the Jewish refusal of abdication from life? A refusal sustained against monstrous odds, in the face of constant oppression and the seductions of a.s.similation (precisely at the hour of danger, as for example during the Six-Day War, Jews, comfortably a.s.similated, have rallied to themselves). Why in G.o.d's name-citing that phrase literally-are there still Jews? Is this the maddening anomaly, this thorn in the flesh of time, which many gentiles have found to be outrageous and inexplicable? Is the endeavor to eliminate the Jew, by outright violence or exclusion, an attempt to resolve this enigma? Simply: why is the world not Judenrein, a term which appears to date back to the turn of the twentieth century in the Linz bicycle club, "cleansed of Jews"? No Etruscans left, no Mayans.

I have no confident answer. Only a tentative conjecture, an intuition, although perhaps not altogether "blameless."

The nucleus of Judaism is a pact with life, to which the commandment "Thou shalt not kill," a commandment so utterly alien to human nature and human history, is merely an inspired footnote.

What are the origins of this contract-do its gravitational waves pulse in the myth of Genesis, in G.o.d's solemn promise of survival to Noah and to Abraham? What negotiation counter to death underlies it? We do not know. How has this accord been transmitted? Modern biology dictates that no such transmission is genetically feasible. Nevertheless, Lamarckian proposals are beginning to reaffirm their pertinence. Sigmund Freud remained a convinced Lamarckian. It is difficult to dismiss the role, the potency of the life-pact in the composition, in the counterfactual destiny, of the Jew. Jewish orthodoxy and scripture remain neutral as to any afterlife. The sacred prevails here and now, the wager is on sunrise. (The primacy of the present tense is unmistakable in Hebrew syntax.) Only this pact, surpa.s.sing common vitality or optimism, can help explain the survival of the Jew across millennia of persecution and repeated decimation. After the purposed finality of the Holocaust. In play was the anomaly of what Ibsen called "the life-lie," of the inextinguishable energies of the Jewish psyche, albeit damaged. How otherwise can we grasp the fact that Jews kept sane, kept resilient after the torment and eradication of millions in the death camps? After the slaughter of their children and the complicity in hatred or indifference of the vast majority of their fellow men? At the moment of his liberation, the radical refusenik, after a decade of incarceration, much of it in solitary, dances across the border line, mocking his guards! Dances as did David before the Ark. In celebration of the mystery of indestructible life that is Judaism.

The incensed response to this mystery must have been initiated and deepened in the collective unconscious-an opaque but probably indispensable reality-of the gentile. At times, this unconscious finds manifest expression. For example in the mesmerizing legend of the Wandering Jew. An object of homicidal detestation and pursuit, Ahasverus wanders "like night from land to land." He is untouchable, immune to the privilege of extinction.

It is my conjecture that this immunity both exasperates and subconsciously terrifies non-Jews. The Jew has been around too long. Like a reproachful atavism, at once spectral and formidably alive. Alert to incipient disaster, he has learned to breathe underwater. This is not an accomplishment that makes friends.

Is there any realistic "solution" (a word itself scarred, Endlsung in the glossary of the butchers)?

An estimated 71 percent of Jews in the U.S.A. enter mixed marriages. It is very difficult to determine how many of such unions comport an abandonment of Jewish practices and remembrance. Obviously crucial is the upbringing of their children. Experts affirm that only 20 percent of the children of mixed marriages will be taught anything of their Jewish heritage. The great majority drift out of any Jewish observance and self-definition. In Israel itself, demography undermines Judaism. Later in our century Palestinian Arabs are expected to outnumber Jews. The format that remains could well be that of a retrenched community in Israel and of Orthodox cl.u.s.ters widely disseminated. Conceivably the future of Judaism now lies with their fanatical fruitfulness (some half-dozen offspring or more) in the paradox of a transnational ghetto. Much speaks against the end-game metamorphosis, including the wondrously renascent dynamics of the Hebrew language. Nonetheless, it is a possible epilogue.

Would it terminate anti-Semitism?

Detestation of the Jew has been of eminent value to Christendom. It has served as a katharsis purging Christian dogma and imaginings of otherwise intractable theological and sociological tensions. The obduracy of the Jew compels the adjournment of the Second Coming. Jewish legalism, its servile adherence to the letter, highlights the contrasting Christian commitment to the spirit. At every salient point the Jew is the adversary in a binary dialectic organic to Christianity. Ec.u.menical touches after genocide, the papal invitation to understanding and conciliation cannot efface the fundamental charge: the Jew is the deicide, the G.o.d-killer on Golgotha. He embodies the progeny of Judas. Thus there is in his sufferings a certain logic of retribution. Where would Christian eschatology be without his adverse lastingness? Yet at the same time it is this lastingness which is intolerable.

Might the spread of atheism, notably in the West, inhibit the rejection of the Jew? Rigorous atheism, the discarding of supernaturalism and transcendent hope, are probably rare. They demand a consequent asceticism and self-governance of consciousness. Customarily these shade into innumerable nuances of indifference, of fitful inattention or downright amnesia. They extend from polemic negation, itself dogmatic, to mundane apathy. The anti-Semitism of the atheist is, strictly considered, an absurdity. It lacks all serious logic or resistance to Mosaic encroachments. Its motivations can be those of social sn.o.bbery or of political and professional rivalry. This is the Marxist-Leninist construct. It can, as in fascism and n.a.z.ism, enlist the idiocies of racism. But it lacks any central logic, any true engagement with the unalterable status of the "chosen" Jew. It is at once visceral and irrelevant. Proust is the unrivaled taxonomist of this complex. Evidence suggests that diverse modes of atheism, of G.o.d-boredom, are spreading in the monetary technological fabric of the developed world. As Laplace foretold, the hypothesis of any deity or supreme being is unnecessary in the regime of the exact and the applied sciences. The criteria of the fact, the rules of evidence, now saturate our unexamined private and social proceedings. In a post-theological order anti-Semitism may wither to embarra.s.sing vulgarity, it may fade to mere triviality. Exclusion from the golf club. This, in turn, would chime with the ebbing of defensive apartheid in the a.s.similated Jew.

The instauration of the State of Israel, that sad miracle, has made it difficult, almost sophistic, to discriminate between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. These meld in the panoply of Islamic hatreds. Islam has no quarrel with the faith of Abraham. The causus belli is the Jewish incursion into the Middle East. What, short of the abolition of Israel, could a.s.suage Arab fury? Once again the fate of a Jewish handful endangers peace at large. Armageddon is located in the Holy Land. Orthodox dwellers do not even acknowledge the nation because its secular foundation lacks messianic license. In the diaspora divisions and hypocrisies abound. Numerous enlightened Jews find the chauvinism, the militarism, the humiliation of Palestinians, all of which are said to be essential to Israel's security, repellent. Jewish intellectuals are prominent in attempts to boycott Israel. Others are parlor Zionists publicly and financially supportive but wholly disinclined to settle in Eretz Israel. In turn, the gentile will use anti-Zionism to legitimize, to mask the traditional reflexes and venom of anti-Semitism. The fog of mendacities thickens when Christian fundamentalists such as American Southern Baptists see in Israel a necessary prelude to their own soteriology (it is in Zion that Jesus will again "reveal himself"). None of these strategies looks to be open to rational reb.u.t.tal. The mythologies of odium are legion and nonnegotiable.

Add to this the somber footnote of Jewish self-hatred. It obtrudes even on the serenity of Spinoza. The Jew projects on himself the contempt, the misprisions, of the gentile anti-Semite. It is only when he accepts this devaluation, preaches Karl Marx, it is only when he liquidates his heritage, that he will pa.s.s out of the nightmare of his condition and blend into normalcy. Pride and self-tormenting ironies alternate in Heine's ambivalence, in the pirouettes in and out of Judaism of Karl Kraus. Echoing Hegel, Wittgenstein denies all Jewish creativity; at best, the Jew is a talented mime, a critic and commentator parasitic in the cultural and aesthetic realms. Biology dooms him to inherent "femininity," according to Weininger. Even circ.u.mcision is suspect. Witness the tragicomic turnings and twistings of Philip Roth.

Are we now approaching the (inadmissible) center?

The existence of Judaism is inextricably inwoven with that of Mosaic monotheism. Whether in wors.h.i.+p or denial, in exultation or despair, in trust or in repentance, the Jew defines himself to himself and to others in terms of his dialogue with or silence toward (Entgegen schweigen) G.o.d. This incessant exchange (also silence is exchange) is enshrined in Torah and the Talmud. These are the daily bread of Jewish consciousness, more significant, as many rabbis have insisted, than any ritual. Rescind the G.o.d-concept, also where it is agonistic, and the Jew is no longer intelligible. He recedes into the pantheon art gallery of dead creeds (those Aztec divinities). Sever the Jew from Sinai and he is no more. No sociological, no psychological investigation can quantify the spectrum of faith or disbelief, of agnosticism or episodic recall, in individual Jewish men and women. To how many, under what domestic or public circ.u.mstance, is the invocation of the "G.o.d of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob" more than automatism or inherited good manners? Impossible to say. Let monotheism decay, make nonsense rhymes of prayer, reduce the rubric of "G.o.d's chosen" to an infantile disorder, and the Jew no longer posits a provocation and object of opprobrium. Would the long nightmare then be over? Is such a mutation conceivable? On the geological and zoological time scale, in regard to the evolution and extinction of species, the more than five millennia claimed by the Jewish calendar are not even the blink of an eye. The phenomenology of the dinosaur dwarfs that of Hebraic scripture. Is the credo of Abraham immune to evanescence?

But even if observance withers to a phantom remnant of the Orthodox, even if vague tatters of belief shrink to atrophied metaphors-we refer still to "sunrise" and "sunset"-one tremendous force and mysterium tremendum will endure: that of remembrance.

In the sinew of his or her being, in the innermost self of their self, the Jew will carry, encapsulate, conserve the dead G.o.d. This in memoriam is incommensurably more powerful, heavier, than any presumed or officious presence. The Jew will be remembrancer and death watch. Decease was prolonged and fitful. Death notices were posted decades prior to Nietzsche (cf. Heine, Jean-Paul). Radical elements in surrealism mime ironic funereal rites. For many Jews G.o.d's death was certified in the Shoah.

The Shoah is the unspeakable. Strictly considered, the avalanche of words it has generated is an obscenity. There is, there should be, nothing to say about the torture, humiliation, starvation, incineration of some six million guiltless men, women, and children-those children-in a systematic h.e.l.l. Here language abandons meaning. This renunciation is no contingent, ancillary catastrophe. It marks, very precisely, the closure of that dialogue, defining, quintessential, between Judaism and its G.o.d. Discourse, the force of the spoken and written word (far beyond either music or the fine arts), have structured Judaism's commerce, narrative, liturgical with its transcendent interlocutor. The articulate, the conceptual, are now void. G.o.d's silence, His muteness in the torture cellars and death camps, signifies far more than His impotence or inattention. It proclaims His demise. What remains of the burning bush is the ash in the crematoria. Whose weight, whose inhuman nullity, is psychically measureless. (How can it be that Jews after Auschwitz are not mad, that they do not transport with them some virus, however covert, of insanity?) Could man, the Jew in particular, have helped G.o.d to survive-Dieu a besoin des hommes-professed existentialism: "Pray to us, G.o.d," urged Paul Celan. Could we have given Him warning of the gas ovens? What shall we do without Him in the strident desert of rationalist-technological mundanity? Absurd questions, but fiercely nagging and eerily a.n.a.logous to the famous "What then shall we do?" of Russian revolutionary hopes. To such questioning the Jew will continue to bear ghostly witness. "Lest I forget thee, oh Jerusalem." This refusal of healing amnesia, this Jewish incapacity to forget, will continue to frighten, to exasperate, the non-Jew. At hidden depths it may remind the non-Jew of his role, active or pa.s.sively indifferent, in the time of b.e.s.t.i.a.lity. Memory is not susceptible to amnesty. It is, therefore, possible that novel, commemorative brands of anti-Semitism will develop. Negationism, already virulent in Islam, is a nauseating but highly suggestive version. It has its parodistic rationale: "How could such a monstrosity have been devised and carried out?" The negationist, however abject his motives, is an advocate for normality: "This simply cannot have happened." Henceforth the Jew must be denied his totally incredible recall. Without which he will recede into zero. What is there left of the Jew without his kaddish, without his lament for a dead G.o.d?

Bearing G.o.d's coffin on his bent back-Faulkner knew much of such a journey-the Jew and the non-Jewish Jew may still have their function. Israel is not the finale. Should it fail, in many respects an unthinkable eventuality, a post-Abrahamic, post-theological Judaism will surely endure. Why should there not be high finance, scientific eminence, compa.s.sionate largesse in Tasmania? Why not found the best newspaper in Lapland? Would the Jew cease to dance in Patagonia?

h.o.m.o sapiens risks nuclear folly and no end to the cycle of ma.s.sacres unless we learn to be each other's guests. As we are guests of life, having chosen neither our place, time, nor social condition of birth. Guests keep their bags packed. They learn languages. They endeavor to leave their host's residence somewhat more comely, humane, and prosperous than they found it. At the same time they must be ready to exit if the city turns despotic or corrupt. These are demanding reflexes of which the Jew has or should have become past master. His departure has often left his sometime hosts lamed. Witness the centuries of near stagnation after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Ask yourself whether German creative and scientific dynamism has recovered after the Reich. Concomitantly, hospitality can harvest rich fruit. What would North American economic, scientific, intellectual stature have been without the Jewish refugee? Freud is buried in Hampstead, Einstein in New Jersey, Paul Celan in Paris. Guests.

Unless I am mistaken, only the Jewish liturgy features an especial blessing for parents among whose children there is a scholar. Jews may number as many philistines or fools as any other ethnic group, but a reverence for the life of the mind, for study and the prestige of the intellect, is ingrained in their awareness. Learning, intellectual debate, textual reference are second nature to Jewish sensibility. Political clout, material gain, the glitter of social cla.s.s may be desirable. But they fall far behind the sanct.i.ty of abstract thought. Marxism is bookish, even Talmudic, to the core. The Jewish contribution to scientific theory far exceeds statistical probability. The very term intelligentsia is bred out of the Dreyfus trauma. Today populist democracy, the sovereignty of the ma.s.s media, egalitarian cant (political correctness), and the naked howl of money const.i.tute a virulent threat to our uncertain chances against barbarism. Persisting ideals arose out of Athens and Jerusalem. It is "Jerusalem" which endures whenever we afford a child the magic of a good book, the music of an equation. The practices of difficulty are the natural piety of the human spirit.

It will be the task of tomorrow's Jew to act as custodian of a defunct Western monotheism. The Holy of Holies is henceforth known to be truly empty, but remembrance stands guard. Memory is possessive beyond presence. We engage future experience by remembering forward. Writ, though no longer holy, will exercise its authority. The Torah will be recognized as G.o.d's biography. The Jew will remain marked by his former intimacies with G.o.d, by the shock and letdown of his near extermination. Anti-Semitism has often portrayed the Jew as a fossil, but it will be a fossil tactlessly alive. "I was what I was," ineradicable. Jewish social thought will devise guidebooks, road maps to a post-metaphysical atlas. Freudian psychoa.n.a.lysis labored to domesticate the incursive thrusts of our imperfectly entombed past. Future Jewish cartography will aim to orient the human enterprise even as we map our cosmologies by the light of stars and nebulae long extinguished. The Jew will seek to be a navigator in the new emptiness.

The dialectical tension between an unalterable commemoration and the exploration of futurities, often bleak, will continue to set the Jew apart. His will be the uninvited specter at the New Age jollities. Within his tribal solidarities, his cherished cult of family, black holes of solitude will persist. Jewish women and men will affront an inward loneliness in that world after G.o.d. It chills Jewish thought in Spinoza, in Wittgenstein. It is the solitude of higher mathematics and of Celan. Jews can be strangers to themselves. That aura of apartness will once again elicit disquiet, hostility, and pestilential phobias among non-Jews. So I suppose, though it is idle to play guessing games about political and social circ.u.mstances to come. But one constant looks to be lasting: no pardon for the Jew. Let him remember the future and be on his tired guard. No solace there, but a fascinating voyage. G.o.d left one posthumous bequest and eleventh commandment to Israel: "Thou shalt not be bored."

MASON STOKES.

Namesake.

FROM Colorado Review.

When I told my uncle Mason that I was gay, my father was back at the house, getting drunk. Earlier that evening I had come out to my parents, and my father didn't take it well. I knew he wouldn't, so I had put this off as long as I could, telling friends and strangers, but not my family. I was operating on a theory a friend shared with me: Come out to people only when you think it will make the relations.h.i.+p better. And don't fool yourself into thinking that coming out to your parents will open up lines of communication long dormant through years spent in the closet. Revelation rarely heals.

But by this time-it was 1996, and I was twenty-eight-I was in a serious relations.h.i.+p with a lovely man named T., and it felt too wrong to keep that a secret. (Never mind that this relations.h.i.+p would end two months later, when T. told me he loved me, and I said, "Thank you.") To lie about myself was one thing; to pretend that someone I cared about didn't exist was another kind of wrong entirely. And so on a hot summer evening in South Carolina, I sat with my parents on the patio of their house and told them I was gay. I remember contorted faces, and a long silence. I remember my mother telling me, in a quavering voice, that she didn't want me to get AIDS. And I remember what my father said, when my mother finally prodded him to say something, "They shoot horses, don't they?" At the time I didn't know the reference to the film in which Michael Sarrazin shoots Jane Fonda because she's too weak to kill herself, but I got the gist.

Later that night, at a restaurant, I told my uncle Mason, my mother's brother. It was just my mother and me, since my father had disappeared into his bedroom shortly after the scene on the patio. And after some halting commiseration, and awkward pledges of continued love, my uncle asked, "So, is it like The Birdcage?"

I laughed, for the first time that evening. The Birdcage, released a year earlier and based on the fabulously gay La Cage aux Folles, features Robin Williams as the gay owner of a drag club in South Beach and Nathan Lane as his queeny companion and the club's drag headliner, Starina. The plot involves this gay couple's straight son bringing home his fiancee, as well as her deeply conservative parents, and for a second I thought my uncle was making a joke about our inverted version of this plot. Well played, I thought. This was something we could work with.

But no, I quickly realized that his reference was less subtle than that. When my uncle thought "gay," he conjured up the h.o.m.os.e.xual excess of floats in a gay pride parade, of men in dresses. In his fevered imagination, he was casting me as Starina. I loved drag, but I'd never done it. I didn't have the shoulders for it. So I tried to explain to my uncle that my gay world was very different from the one he imagined. It was, in fact, quite boring, if South Beach was your only point of comparison. And as I walked him through the ba.n.a.l particulars of my so-called gay life, I was struck by how absurd this conversation had become.

Because here's the thing about my uncle, my never-married, more-than-a-little-queeny, bachelor uncle: I had long a.s.sumed that he was gay, that his name wasn't the only thing we had in common. And given that, how could he so fail to understand the story I was telling him? How could he think that, after dinner, perhaps, I would put on pancake makeup and a dress and lip-sync to "Can't Help Lovin' That Man"?

Later that night he asked me another question: "So, would you ever want to bring someone home to meet the family?" And it struck me that this question, more accurately than his first, reflected his great distance from my life and its possibilities. The world of The Birdcage was alien and extreme, but at least he had a reference for it, something that helped him to see it. But a world where I would bring a male partner home to meet my family? That was beyond his ability to imagine. And I wondered: Was there longing in his voice when he asked this question? Was there regret? Was there envy?

When my mother and I got back to the house, we discovered the remnants of my father's evening: a half-empty bottle of bourbon on the counter, leftover roast beef and rice in the microwave, the microwave door hanging open like an accusation. He had gotten hungry, my father, but rather than face me, he fled back to his bedroom when he heard our car pull into the driveway.

Being named after my uncle was a gift. My older brother had scooped up my father's name, the perfectly fine, though ultimately forgettable, "Doug." So I was left with "Mason," which, in 1967, was still fresh. This was a name that set me apart, and I was happy to have it, not least because my uncle was so much fun. He was game for all the stupid stuff kids want to do, all the stuff that makes parents rethink the whole parenting thing. Amus.e.m.e.nt parks, arcades, houses that defy gravity, mile-high grizzly bears-my uncle could always be counted on to ferry us away to whatever cheesy attraction the area offered.

He was the life of every party, the big man whose wet laughter announced the center of whatever was happening at the moment. My brother and I competed for his time and attention. On family vacations that required two cars, we'd fight to ride with him, not simply because he had sharper wheels (absent the upkeep of children, he allowed himself a new Cadillac every few years), but because he'd sometimes let us steer, well before the legal age of steering. Whoever didn't get the front seat would sit in back, ready to supply my uncle with another Budweiser from the cooler. (As with the steering, this was well before casual drinking and driving was an unforgivable sin.) He was a talented musician, and at the piano his big hands spanned way more than an octave, enabling the kind of boogie-woogie, left-hand work people demanded if there was a piano around. His relations.h.i.+p to the piano seemed entirely organic. He never required sheet music, and you never knew what he was going to play when he sat down, but you knew he was inventing it on the spot. It was new every time. My uncle at the piano, his left foot pounding the floor, setting lamps and vases moving, was the closest thing to excess you could find in my family. He played the role of uncle to the hilt, swooping in for benign subversions of parental authority, swooping out again when the time came to pick up the pieces. Had he ever allowed himself his own Starina moment, it would have been as Auntie Mame.

There were, of course, downsides to being my uncle's namesake, the chief of which was being called, at least within the family, "Little Mason" until I had reached the unseemly age of thirty-seven, the year "Big Mason" died and cleared the field. But mostly carrying my uncle's name was more boon than burden. It created a bond between us, one that was heightened by the other things we shared: an outgoing personality, a slightly ridiculous sense of humor, a musical talent, and something else I lacked a language for: some quiet sense I had that he lived his life outside the laws that governed other people-that he lived outside expectation. This was an example I would need, though I was too young to know it on those summer days at the beach, when I was six, and my parents would find me curled up in a ball outside my uncle's bedroom door, waiting for him to emerge from his afternoon nap so that the fun could start again.

The bachelor-especially the bachelor uncle-was a figure in the South, a recognizable type. A bit dandyish, the bachelor was a trickster figure, someone who hovered outside convention, who discovered loopholes of possibility. As a category, bachelor carried within it a seemingly unresolvable contradiction. On the one hand, the bachelor signified a kind of heteros.e.xual excess, the single man unleashed from marriage and babies, freed from the confines of the domestic. The bachelor could roam the world of heteros.e.xual possibility, more often than not sporting an ascot, and never get caught. On the other hand, bachelor was a knowing, if relatively polite, slur, a euphemism for queer, or uns.e.xed. And yet, ironically, it was a slur that saved men like my uncle from the taint of h.o.m.os.e.xuality. It both named the possibility of s.e.xual deviance and politely cloaked that possibility in the figure of heteros.e.xual excess, thus leading to that oddest of phrases, the "confirmed" bachelor. What would it take, one wonders, to confirm such a thing? What kind of test would someone have to pa.s.s? The confirmed bachelor led a double life: someone who would never marry because he was queer, and someone who would never marry because he was too busy having s.e.x with lots of different women.

This tension played out in my own family in quiet ways. I remember discovering a book tucked away on the shelves of my parents' den with the t.i.tle Everything I Know About s.e.x. My uncle's name appeared on the spine as the author. It was a thick book, but when I opened it, I found nothing but empty page after empty page, a gag gift, presumably, and one that my uncle must not have appreciated, since the book was on our shelves rather than his.

I also remember my father's many references to a family friend as my uncle's "girlfriend." She was, indeed, my uncle's constant social companion and had been for as long as I could remember. She was with us on holidays and vacations, as much an aunt to me as Mason was an uncle. But there was never, to the extent that I could tell, the slightest romantic spark between the two of them, not a shared room on vacation, never a held hand. Like my uncle, this family friend never married, and as I got older and learned the term beard, I a.s.sumed that this was what they had been to each other: social partners who disguised their h.o.m.os.e.xuality through the social fiction of longtime companions.

But when my father called her my uncle's girlfriend, did he believe it? Or was this, like the joke book, a not-so-subtle jab at the confirmed bachelor, someone whose "girlfriend" would always be in quotes?

That halting conversation on the patio, and the one with my uncle at the restaurant, turned out to be the only times my family and I would talk about these things until ten years later, after both my mother and uncle had died. And this silence wasn't our regular kind of silence, the silence of a family that tacitly agrees not to confront difficulty. Rather, it was willed. It was the silence of an explicit prohibition.

Just a couple of months after coming out to my parents, I received a letter, signed by both my mother and father, though written in my father's hand. I was living in Virginia, where I was teaching. My relations.h.i.+p with T., which had inspired my revelation, had just ended.

The letter seemed oddly familiar to me, since I had seen versions of it in various made-for-TV movies about families torn apart by a son's h.o.m.os.e.xuality. And though my parents never actually said what was always said in those movies-"I would rather you were dead"-they did write that they would prefer anything to my being gay. The work of filling in the blank of that "anything" was left to me.

They asked me never to speak to them again about my romantic life. I wasn't to mention T., nor was I to speak about any of this to my brother or anyone else in the family. I would always be welcome in their home, they wrote, but only if I came alone, and only if I played by the rules concerning what could and couldn't be said.

The irony wasn't lost on me. By refusing to hear any news of T., they missed the biggest news of all: that we were no longer a couple. Had I been able to tell them that I had broken T.'s heart on a beach in Oregon, perhaps they could have escaped whatever depraved visions troubled their sleep.

I kept this letter for almost a decade. I was angry, and whenever I felt the anger fading, I would retrieve the letter from the box on the top shelf of my closet and feed the anger that had become as essential to me as my name. I imagined the letter as a kind of eternal flame, threatening to engulf the closet that hid it, the house, my life. When the house was quiet, I could almost hear the letter crackle and pop, its flicker dancing in the darkness. Fires eventually burn themselves out, people say. They run out of fuel. I wasn't so sure.

My mother died two years after sending that letter. In the aftermath, communication with my father was even more strained, since my mother was the oil that kept a barely functioning machine going. And when my uncle died, six years later, this left just my father and me, with so much to talk about but no ability to do so. Wanting a smaller house, he sold his and bought my uncle's, so on my rare trips home to see him, I found myself in what had been Uncle Mason's house, choking on the silence.

As a diversion, I spent a fair amount of time snooping through my uncle's things. Silence breeds a longing to know, and in an effort to fill in the missing pieces, I had already constructed a story for him, a tragic account of missed opportunities. He was, in this fantasy, the gay man born fifty years too soon, a man whose desires found no home in the world. That thing inside him that made him want the things he shouldn't want: that was sickness. That was the work of the Devil. And it could be resisted only through discipline, denial, and a surrender to G.o.d. In shaping his story this way, I was able to cast myself as its hero, the man who had the opportunities my uncle lacked, who could live his gay life-his real life-for him. I would dedicate every kiss, every grope, every exchange of fluids to my uncle's queer memory.

The first thing I discovered in my snooping was a painful reminder of the distance between us. I had hoped to find, of course, a diary, something that laid out, in dishy detail, the love that dare not speak its name. I had come to expect such things of figures from the queer past, who were, according to my research, obsessive diary-keepers. I knew that Arthur Benson, for example, English writer and master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, had filled 180 volumes with over four million words, almost all of them an attempt to understand the unseemly things he felt for the undergraduates in his charge.

My uncle, it turned out, was no Arthur Benson. He left behind no "Dear Diary" recounting of things that couldn't be spoken. He did keep, however, a rather sporadic log, less a diary than a kind of shorthand remembrance of the day's events. There were no secrets here, no revelations. I scanned for any mention of me, but found only one, from the day I had told the truth about myself: "Distressing news from Mason today." There it was, in his beautiful if prissy hand-he had studied calligraphy-proof that I had been the cause of distress. In those five words I learned more about how he truly felt than I had in any conversation. I had hurt him in ways he never let me know.

The transition from this log entry to a photo of my uncle, probably in his seventies, posing in front of the Liberace Museum was both jarring and hopeful. I knew this museum well, having spent a delightful afternoon there once with a boyfriend, both of us eager to escape the Vegas Strip. We marveled at the mirrored piano, the capes, the sequins, the chandeliers, the pink-feathered boas. But mostly we marveled at our fellow visitors, a bimodal mix of queens and grandparents, thirty-something gay men seeking their idol and senior citizens seeking theirs. How to read my uncle's presence there? A whole generation would go to their graves certain that Liberace was the most heteros.e.xual of men. Another would find in him the flamboyance and camp they needed to survive. What did Liberace mean, when he meant so many very different things at once?