The Great Good Thing (6 page)

I don't know what it was about that branch that caught my full attention. Something, though, because I can remember the look of it to this day. It was the branch of an oak tree, I think. Far off, in the backyard not of the house right in front of me, but of the house behind that one. It was a single branch jutting out two or three feet beyond the tree's green crown, near the top. The stouter part of it was bare, colored that white-brown-gray branch color there's no good name for. (Who ever says “taupe”?) But there was a cluster of dark green leaves near the tip of it, where the main arm forked into dwindling twiglets. The sky behind the leaves was very blue with a single small, white cumulus cloud slowly drifting through it.

And I saw it, really saw it. The branch, the sky, the cloud, the whole scene. I broke through my thoughts and my dreams and myself and I was just there, completely there. I stopped walking. I stood with my schoolbooks held low against my leg. The cooly yearning autumn breeze stroked my cheeks and stirred my hair and I gazed at that branch and my mind was silent. My attention was turned completely outward. No fantasy, only the world. I saw it all.

What a disappointment it was! There was nothing to it. It was just a branch, that's all. Real enough but cold, empty of emotional presence. It held no sweetness, no pleasure, no beauty. It was not like the high branches of my backyard oak when I lay under it, or the branches of my apple tree when I climbed on them and hid among them. I was fond of those; I loved them. This—this faraway branch—it was just a fact. A lifeless pattern. A branch against the sky, some leaves, a drifting cloud. This wasn't what I had been looking for at all. This was nothing. A branch. A cloud. The sky. Nothing.

I came back into myself, let down, deflated. I understood at once what had gone wrong, the flaw at the heart of my whole experiment. I don't remember now what eight-year-old words I used to describe my understanding to myself, but the gist of it was this: The world had no beauty of its own. The beauty of the world was created in the human experience, in me. The very fact of beauty, the very idea that something could be beautiful, only existed in me. The point was not to see the world. There was nothing out there to see, nothing worthwhile at any rate, just shapes, just patterns. The point was to
experience
the world, to know it simultaneously both without and within.

But I had lost the talent for living like that, and I could not get it back again merely by staring.

How then? How could I reclaim the world and my life in the world? How could a person free himself from the prison of his own consciousness in order to know the beauty of the world as it existed only within his consciousness?

Ah, well—that was a puzzle way beyond the abilities of an eight-year-old, even a puzzle-loving eight-year-old like me.

And so I left the branch behind. I left the world behind. I went on my way to school, that day and all the days that followed, in solitude, cut off from reality, surrendered to stories, addicted to dreams.

T
here were three main synagogues in our town, as I remember it. Each represented a different degree of religious observance, light, medium, or heavy: Reform, Conservative, or Orthodox. We were Conservative by my dad's decree. We had a Seder meal at Passover. We went to synagogue on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. We lit candles on the eight nights of Hanukkah. We even fasted on Yom Kippur, the annual Day of Atonement. We went to Hebrew School, too, twice during the week, I think it was, and maybe a third time on Sundays. There we were supposed to learn Hebrew and the Bible and ultimately prepare for our bar mitzvahs.

My mom helped out with all this, of course. She prepared the meals, chauffeured us to temple, and so on. But she made it clear she was only doing her duty by my dad. She would tease him about it. She would say, “You know you're just doing this to please your dead father.” My paternal grandfather died
when I was very young. My clearest memory of him was of seeing him close to the end of his life. “Prepare yourself,” my father had told me and my older brother as we climbed the narrow stairs to his apartment. “He doesn't look good.”

I remember a shockingly withered and gentle creature swamped by the wing chair from which he could no longer rise. In his youth, however, he was a stern and intimidating traditionalist apparently, a tough-guy pawnbroker who kept a kosher house and expected his two sons to do the same. My mother felt Dad maintained Jewish practices in our house only for fear of his memory.

My dad acknowledged—ruefully—that there was some truth to that. But our Hebrew rituals and schooling were important to him personally too. He saw the world as a gentile world forever hostile to its Jews. He didn't want us to retreat an inch in the face of its bigotry.
They'll still kill you, even if you try to pretend to be one of them, so don't humiliate yourself with cultural surrender.
That was the general idea.

But also, and more reasonably, there was this. My father wanted us, his sons, to know our own people. He wanted us to take their history seriously. He didn't want us to leave our heritage behind.

Which was fair enough, in theory. But in practice, there was a problem with it, a big problem with all of it—with the high holy days and the Hebrew School and the bar mitzvahs—one big problem that troubled my heart from an early age. My parents did not believe in God.

My mother, for her part, was a stone atheist, like her
mother before her. I've never met anyone else as firm as she was in her disbelief. Oh, sometimes she would make some vague gesture toward the idea of a deity. She felt it was her duty as a mother, I think. She didn't want to pull the metaphysical rug out from under her children's feet too abruptly lest they bruise themselves plummeting into the existential abyss. She'd tell us things like:
God is the people who love you
. Or:
There's something out there; no one knows what for sure.
But, of course, you can't fool kids with that sort of mealy-mouthed malarkey. I knew where she stood. As I got older, I could even coax her true opinion out of her from time to time.
If you ask me
,
it's all a lot of hooey.

Of my father's beliefs, I'm not quite as sure. He was close and canny about them, not just with us but with himself as well, I think; maybe even with God. It was not in his nature to openly defy a Gigantic Invisible Jew who could give you cancer just by thinking about it. But by the same token, he wasn't simply going to kowtow to the Power. He felt the need to give the Lord a little
zetz
from time to time—a Yiddish smack—of sarcasm, disrespect, and disbelief. I think he prayed when things troubled him; it couldn't hurt. The father he appeased with his observances was sometimes his own father and sometimes the Big Father in the Sky. He hedged his bets: he took Pascal's Wager but held half of his cash in reserve in case the game turned out to be some kind of cheap hustle.

In any case, for child me, the larger point was this: God was not a living presence in my home. We did not say grace before meals. We did not kneel down by our beds at night.
We were not told to pray in times of hardship. We were not referred to the will of God in matters of morality. Aside from collecting pennies for UNICEF on Halloween and occasionally putting quarters aside for the United Jewish Appeal, we did no volunteer work and had no charity life of any kind.

For me, this rendered our Jewish observances absurd. I was the boy, after all, who demanded that even his daydreams make some kind of sense. I became frustrated with a mystery story if even a single thread of the plot was left loose. And I had what I would call a very
Jewish
insistence on the rational basis for any supernatural belief. I could see that the magnificent four-thousand-year-old structure of Jewish theology and tradition was, at its core, a kind of language for communicating with the divine presence. Subtract the Almighty and what was the purpose of it? It was just an empty temple, its foundations resting on nothing, its spires pointing only toward the dark.

The absurdity of our godless Judaism affected all the family's practices. My earliest memories of our Passover Seders are uproariously comical. The dinners would begin as carefully orchestrated and solemn religious rituals. Slowly at first, then very quickly, they would devolve into swing-from-the-rafters madcap circuses with my brothers and me clowning around like wild monkeys. A Seder really is a fine event. It's a dignified but joyful remembrance of how God freed the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt. The youngest son asks four prescribed questions of his father so the father can explain the majestic meaning of the feast. The participants drip wine on a plate
while intoning the names of the ten plagues with which God crushed the resistance of Pharaoh:
blood . . . frogs . . . lice . . .
Everyone slouches on cushioned chairs to remind themselves that they are free men and women, no longer slaves. It's lovely.

But in my house we added a ritual in which my little brothers half swallowed the silver wine cups and then spat them across the table into each other's foreheads. My older brother, meanwhile, kept up a withering sardonic commentary. And I put my face on the tablecloth and laughed till I wept. My mother would hide her smile at the antic chaos but my father, no. That was another part of our ritual: he would routinely storm out of the room in a fury over our disrespect.

It was shameful, I know. But it really was funny. And how else could it have been? Without God, none of it made any sense. Hebrew School? For me, who already hated ordinary school, an extra classroom hour every few days was suffocating torture. Who were these grave and self-important men who kept us from our games to teach us Hebrew and Torah? Why were they bothering us with such things? With their thick sepulchral accents and their harsh, punitive piety? With their bizarre language and their empty legends of an unknowable past? And Israel! They were forever yammering on about the nation of Israel! I remember when the Israelis, outnumbered and pressed against the sea, defeated the Arab nations in the Six-Day War. The Hebrew School front office piped the news reports into our classrooms over the loudspeakers. Our teachers wept at the miraculous victory. I found it ridiculous. I was American. What was Israel to me and who was I to Israel?

I was somehow managing to shuck and jive my way through ordinary school, but I didn't have the energy or even the common courtesy to fake it here. I was sullen and unresponsive in religious classes. Sharp-tongued and disrespectful to the pompous and overbearing teachers. When we had tests on the Bible, I wrote flippant answers to questions about stories I'd never bothered to read.

How did Moses help Joshua defeat the Amalekites?

He brought the tanks.

Once, to my absolute horror, a session of Hebrew School conflicted with a game of the World Series in which the Yankees were playing. I put a transistor radio in my pants pocket and ran the earplug wire up through the sleeve of my sweater. All through the lesson on Exodus, I sat leaning my head on my hand, pressing the palmed earbud into my ear so I could listen to the game. My father used to say, “You can't flunk out of being Jewish.” But man, I tried. I remember more than one report card when I received a P in every single subject. It stood for Poor, the lowest grade you could get.

By the time I began to prepare for my bar mitzvah, I was utterly alienated from the entire enterprise.

“I don't believe in this,” I told my father. “I don't want to do it.”

“It doesn't matter,” he said. “You have to.”

Three years later, fueled by seething adolescent rage, I would have defied him. When that time came, I did defy him, again and again. My fury and stubbornness drove him crazy, literally drove him to seek psychiatric help. But at twelve years
old, I still thought I lived in the happiest of happy TV-type families. To defy my father in this most basic realm of his authority would have been to pull down the pillars of that illusion like Samson pulled down the pillars in the temple. I didn't have the wherewithal. I complained and protested—often—but I did not resist. And my resentment of the whole process burned like acid in my blood.

Naturally, in a town like Great Neck, bar mitzvahs were a big deal. The thirteen-year-old boy, in his best Saturday suit, would stand with the rabbi and cantor at the front of the synagogue. The pews would be filled with friends and relations from all over. The boy would read out a Torah portion in Hebrew, not spoken but sung to a ritualized Eastern tune that he'd had to memorize line by line. Afterward, he would make a speech, written himself and vetted by the rabbi. “Today I am a man,” he would say, affirming that he had now accepted his place as a full-fledged member of the Jewish tribe. Increasingly, in those days, girls did this too: a
bat
mitzvah, it was called. I believe it was just then becoming the fashion.

In any case, boy or girl, the ceremony was generally followed by a massive and elaborate party, comparable in excess to a full-on white wedding reception. A hall was rented, some cavernous place with pink walls and enormous chandeliers and bubbling fountains. Or sometimes, in summer weather, a huge tent was set up in the backyard next to the pool. Indoors or out, a live band would play the new rock 'n' roll music. There would be enough bad food to feed a small nation, oceans of terrible Jewish wine, sentimental congratulatory speeches,
and lavish gifts of jewelry and cash. It was a garish business, as we upper-crust Klavans never failed to point out, but it was a happy one too. Most kids looked forward to their big day. My older brother had survived it without too much emotional agony—or so, at least, it seemed to me.

But I hated it, every minute of it. It galled me to my soul. I felt I was being bullied into a public act of hypocrisy. I was being forced to pretend to accept what I did not: Judaism without God, Judaism as a sop to my father's dead father, Judaism as a fist shaken at a gentile world that was just as much my world as the gentiles'. This was the only Judaism I had experienced, and it was foreign and false to me. I wanted no part of it. The idea of lying about that in front of everyone I knew violated something very basic in me.

The preparation for the event was like Hebrew School only ten times worse. Extra classes at night. Extra homework to ignore. Extra humiliation to suffer when I showed up in the extra classes unprepared. Plus, on top of all that, a rabbi actually came to the house once or twice a week. A fat, sweaty, unpleasant man as I recall him. He would later go on to be convicted by a federal jury of being part of a loan-sharking operation in league with some New York mafiosi. I believe he did some serious time upstate.

The rabbi would sit shoulder to shoulder with me upstairs in my room at my desk, our heads bowed together over the open book of Torah. He would cue and harry me through the incomprehensible Hebrew I was supposed to be able to read by then but couldn't. He would sing a line and then I'd sing it
back to him and then he'd sing it again and I'd sing back and so on until I had the words and music more or less memorized. Then I was supposed to practice in my spare time. Then he would come back a few days later and we'd review what I'd learned and move on to the next part.

Except, as I need hardly say at this point, I never practiced, never. As the day drew near, I found I barely knew my part at all, just patches of it here and there, and I could sing only a vague meandering imitation of the tune. So, of course, when my bar mitzvah finally arrived, I stepped onto the chancery with the purest sense of dread. It was like one of those nightmares where you find yourself on a Broadway stage but can't remember your lines. There I was in tie and jacket, standing in the temple before a congregation full of family and friends. My pulse was thundering. My spit had first turned sour then gone dry. I joined the rabbi in the sacred procedure of lifting the bejeweled Torah scrolls from their cabinet. We paraded them majestically before the pews. We laid them on the podium—the
bimah
—and rolled them open to the proper place. I took up the Torah pointer—the
yad
, it's called—and placed it under those ancient and noble words that, after years of attending Hebrew School, I could read no better than if they were chicken tracks or a schizophrenic's meaningless doodles. And I began to sing.

Well, the rabbi had come to the house often enough that I had some vague idea of where the words and music were located on the spectrum of available sounds. I found their general location as a man might stumble into the side of his
own barn while wandering lost in the dark of night. Since the words meant nothing to me anyway, I only had to imitate the noise of them to get by. And for the most part I did, with the loan-sharking rabbi whispering helpful cues into my ear from time to time. There were a few portions that were lost to my memory completely, but I never faltered for all that. I had inherited a small measure of my father's talent for realistic-sounding foreign-language gibberish. Faced with an absolute mental blank, I invented a bunch of Hebrew-like gobbledygook on the spot and pushed through, singing meaningless nonsense without a pause. I don't know how many people noticed. The only person to mention it to me was a cousin of mine, a sophisticated lad a few years older than me. He sidled up to me after the ceremony as I was receiving the kisses and congratulations of my jubilant relatives. “I don't think I've ever heard anyone ad-lib the Torah before,” he murmured in my ear. I laughed wildly—with relief but also with a grifter's pleasure at having pulled off a successful con.