remember who these two people were.
Besides, it’s not a Russian thing to follow rules, unless of course not following them will likely mean prison or worse. Many rules are in fact inherently stupid. Look at this rule about burial. You are required to be of the faith to be buried in a Jewish cemetery. The logic of such a rule, perhaps obvious to you, seems nonexistent to me. My father, like my mother, would end up a pile of bones soon enough. Did it really matter whether the penis once attached to my father’s bones had a foreskin? After a few years underground, what evidence would there be of his Jewishness or lack thereof?
But my father was right. I do play whack-a-mole with my sins. I try to be a good person for, as the tacky Christmas song goes, goodness sake. Unfortunately, I don’t possess the strength of will to avoid even the most common and obvious of pitfalls. So I do pray. I am, in fact, a praying atheist, and I’m sure there are many like me, although it’s not a population that is measured in any census of which I am aware. What does prayer provide me, the most ordinary of sinners? A sense that my frailty is communal, a sense that I shouldn’t be singled out for my human failures, or my attempts, however pathetic, to rid myself of them.
I prayed in Tuscaloosa regularly, most Friday nights at a tiny synagogue in a building that once housed a Jewish dry goods store. I certainly know how to pray according to the rules. In my teens, my mother sent me off to a Jewish high school in Chicago for a proper education. The idea was that rigor of any stripe would be lacking in the public high schools of Madison. The first time I went to the Tuscaloosa synagogue, the rabbi was out of town, and the synagogue president was on the
bima
[podium] valiantly trying to lead the services in a halting Hebrew with a crib sheet. I looked up from the second row and began to play the role of prompter, mouthing the syllables so she could see. After that incident I was more or less thrust into the role of assistant rabbi, which meant from then on I sometimes led services in the rabbi’s absence.
Word of my semi-prowess in prayer and in Hebrew seemed to spread magically outside the barely existent Jewish community of Tuscaloosa into the general populace. Three blue-haired, Bible-toting ladies started to come by my house occasionally on Sundays.
With a mixture of the earnestness of faith and the bossiness of a healthy old age, they would show me passages that interested them in a dark brown, leather-bound King James Old Testament. They wanted to know, “What’s it say in the original?” I would pull out my Five Books of Moses and translate the contents directly from the Hebrew for comparison. I never tried to tell them that the Hebrew from which I was reading was essentially a translation as well. I admired them for their faith and desire, however misguided, to get to know something akin to the true story.
I met my uncle at the synagogue, where we prayed, as is customary for those in mourning. I hadn’t been there in a long time, and the old guys—some of the same old guys who were already stooped over and tiny when I was a kid—gave me a nod of awareness before we began. Then, after, they all shook my hand and told me what a wonderful woman my mother had been.
My uncle and I drove to the cemetery, the hot air in his Lincoln Town Car blasting and keeping us remarkably warm despite the cold outside. “She wanted a plain pine box, you know,” I said. “Just some rope around it. That’s it.”
“People will think we’re being cheap. We need to do something a little better,” my uncle said.
“OK, whatever.”
“The governor call you?”
“The governor? Maybe. There were a lot of messages. I couldn’t possibly listen to all of them.”
“Dombrowski himself was on the phone. Not an aide. He was asking about the funeral.” My uncle tapped his wedding ring against the steering wheel.
“You know him?”
“I give
Besides, it’s not a Russian thing to follow rules, unless of course not following them will likely mean prison or worse. Many rules are in fact inherently stupid. Look at this rule about burial. You are required to be of the faith to be buried in a Jewish cemetery. The logic of such a rule, perhaps obvious to you, seems nonexistent to me. My father, like my mother, would end up a pile of bones soon enough. Did it really matter whether the penis once attached to my father’s bones had a foreskin? After a few years underground, what evidence would there be of his Jewishness or lack thereof?
But my father was right. I do play whack-a-mole with my sins. I try to be a good person for, as the tacky Christmas song goes, goodness sake. Unfortunately, I don’t possess the strength of will to avoid even the most common and obvious of pitfalls. So I do pray. I am, in fact, a praying atheist, and I’m sure there are many like me, although it’s not a population that is measured in any census of which I am aware. What does prayer provide me, the most ordinary of sinners? A sense that my frailty is communal, a sense that I shouldn’t be singled out for my human failures, or my attempts, however pathetic, to rid myself of them.
I prayed in Tuscaloosa regularly, most Friday nights at a tiny synagogue in a building that once housed a Jewish dry goods store. I certainly know how to pray according to the rules. In my teens, my mother sent me off to a Jewish high school in Chicago for a proper education. The idea was that rigor of any stripe would be lacking in the public high schools of Madison. The first time I went to the Tuscaloosa synagogue, the rabbi was out of town, and the synagogue president was on the
bima
[podium] valiantly trying to lead the services in a halting Hebrew with a crib sheet. I looked up from the second row and began to play the role of prompter, mouthing the syllables so she could see. After that incident I was more or less thrust into the role of assistant rabbi, which meant from then on I sometimes led services in the rabbi’s absence.
Word of my semi-prowess in prayer and in Hebrew seemed to spread magically outside the barely existent Jewish community of Tuscaloosa into the general populace. Three blue-haired, Bible-toting ladies started to come by my house occasionally on Sundays.
With a mixture of the earnestness of faith and the bossiness of a healthy old age, they would show me passages that interested them in a dark brown, leather-bound King James Old Testament. They wanted to know, “What’s it say in the original?” I would pull out my Five Books of Moses and translate the contents directly from the Hebrew for comparison. I never tried to tell them that the Hebrew from which I was reading was essentially a translation as well. I admired them for their faith and desire, however misguided, to get to know something akin to the true story.
I met my uncle at the synagogue, where we prayed, as is customary for those in mourning. I hadn’t been there in a long time, and the old guys—some of the same old guys who were already stooped over and tiny when I was a kid—gave me a nod of awareness before we began. Then, after, they all shook my hand and told me what a wonderful woman my mother had been.
My uncle and I drove to the cemetery, the hot air in his Lincoln Town Car blasting and keeping us remarkably warm despite the cold outside. “She wanted a plain pine box, you know,” I said. “Just some rope around it. That’s it.”
“People will think we’re being cheap. We need to do something a little better,” my uncle said.
“OK, whatever.”
“The governor call you?”
“The governor? Maybe. There were a lot of messages. I couldn’t possibly listen to all of them.”
“Dombrowski himself was on the phone. Not an aide. He was asking about the funeral.” My uncle tapped his wedding ring against the steering wheel.
“You know him?”
“I give
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