Gospel (89 page)

After several twists and turns and security people as well as students directing her, she found herself before the whitewashed campus synagogue and in view of another domed structure that looked like a greenhouse, and between those two was the building where Rabbi Hersch had set up a temporary office to be near the National Library. Ordinarily, as the rabbi had explained, he was up where the action is at the Mt. Scopus campus, a disputed zenith by turns Jordanian, Israeli, Jordanian, and now Israeli but in the West Bank.

Lucy found the name Hersch on a bilingual roster. She approached his office and saw the door ajar and that a conversation was going on within. She waited a bit, not wanting to interrupt, but realized this Talmudic discourse might be destined for hours, so she made a humble knock.

“Yavo,”
said the rabbi.

“It's me,” said Lucy, poking her head around the corner.

The rabbi sat behind an old wooden desk, a cubicle encased in books with venerable black leather–bound commentaries on the shelf at arm level. Lucy saw the tutorial involved a young Hasidic student in the black suit, white tasseled whatever-you-called-it, the wisps of a beard on his chin and the black forelocks hanging from his temples. The Hasid glanced at Lucy only to turn his head and look away.

“Gimme a minute or two,” said Rabbi Hersch. “Sit down if you like.”

Lucy scooted to the other chair in the room.

Lucy noticed there was to be no introduction. Of course not, she reasoned, being an unclean shikse, harlot of the Gentiles. The Hasidic boy obviously didn't want her to be there, and Lucy could discern she was being complained against in Hebrew. The rabbi answered him back unpleasantly, and directed the boy back to the Talmud. Lucy listened, not understanding.

The rabbi asked questions and the boy with dwindling confidence answered until finally the rabbi had him stumped. Rabbi Hersch reached behind him and pulled down a dusty commentary and read from it, pointing out a whole passage that the student might want to read—or perhaps, should have read. Lucy saw the young man blush deeply. Ha, she thought maliciously, shamed before me, the unclean one …

The rabbi must have said something to the effect of “that's it for today.” At this cue, the student gathered his papers in his satchel and, taking special care not to make eye contact with Lucy, left the room in a show of hurriedness.

“Warm and friendly those Hasids,” said Lucy.

“You think he disapproves of
you?
It's all he can do to take Talmud from
me!
”

“Why doesn't he go to a Hasidic university then?”

“Oh, Hebrew University is the big schamola and he knows it. He'll just have to put up with my
apiksorische,
pagan ways.”

Lucy was particularly humorless about this. “Let me guess,” she said, “I'm a
goya
—is that the female form?”

“
Sheygets
for boys,
shikse
for girls,
goyim
for both of you,” he corrected. “
Goya,
huh? This ain't Italian, little girl.”

“I'm a Gentile woman, and I might be thoroughly unfit in the eyes of God because I might be menstruating, that heinous act.” The rabbi reared back, laughing. “Will it offend you, rabbi, if I say I think…”

“If as a 20th-Century woman you think that's crap?” the rabbi offered.

Lucy was emboldened: “The sexism is par for the course in religion, but smugly thinking you're superior to the Gentile race as well as other Jews seems racist. And some part of the reason Jews aren't liked by many people in the world.”

“Including yourself,” he stated cheerily.

“I'm not anti-Semitic,” she said.

“Nuuuu, of course not,” he said. “You just don't like any Jewish people you've ever met. They're pushy, they're arrogant, they would step on you for a dime—”

“I'm not saying that. I'm saying I think … Well, there's no point really in talking about it.”

The rabbi still stood behind his desk, having locked his desk drawers and stacked all his papers in a pile. “No, there's every point in talking about it. Can't offend me. Not here. This is Eretz Yisrael. Unlike the U.S., we speak plainly and, as our guest, feel free to do the same.”

All right, she would. “Rabbi, on Friday when I was in the Moslem Quarter I heard the Sabbath horn-thing—”

He cackled again. “I like that. We could market that, a
shabbatophone,
like the saxophone.”

“And I was sitting there at the Third Station corner, you know, where Via Dolorosa meets whatever it is, uh—”

“I gotcha.”

“And here comes all these Hasidic Jews up from the Jewish Quarter. Not through the Christian Quarter, which would be quicker, or out the Jaffa Gate, but up through the Moslem Quarter, their heads covered with shawls. They ran at great speed as they passed through this … this unclean territory of infidels. No eye contact, no attempt not to run over children or into old ladies. And O'Hanrahan said when they'd get to, wherever…”

“Mea Shearim.”

“When they got to the synagogue, they would dust off their shoes because they had trod upon the soil of all these unclean people.”

“So?”

Lucy felt the case was evident. “You just can't act that way in this world. Not anymore. I mean, that kind of arrogance will get you guys wiped out one day. I mean, what happens if in some reversal, the Palestinians take Mea Shearim?”

“Well, the Hasidim could get their asses kicked. Mind you, they got machine guns for days tucked away up there.”

“I mean, this is no way to win friends and influence people.”

“Welllll,” he said patiently, “we were the cream of aristocratic Germany, Mendelssohn and the Rothschilds, and we were leading lights at all the secular universities, shone in society, and what good did it do us, huh? We got wiped out anyway in Europe.”

Lucy nodded heavily. “Yes, that's true. But do you expect me to be happy about being considered so low as not to be acknowledged as a fellow human? God made me—it doesn't matter to Him that I'm Gentile or a woman.”

“It matters to Torah.”

“I guess that's what I'm saying, then. I'm not so crazy about the Torah if it can't be updated.”

“Updated like a manual, like the sports scores,” he chuckled, as he escorted Lucy from the office down the hallway. “Well,” he argued simply, “go somewhere else, where Torah isn't being applied. There's plenty of the world left over. There's only twenty million Jews anyway, and most aren't observant and most of them aren't Hasidic and only a handful, a
handful,
cut through the Moslem Quarter, and so Jews are to be judged by this five-minute inconvenience, this perceived slight? Don't try to become pals with the Hasidim and you won't be slighted. Whadya want? The Welcome Wagon?”

“I will never win an argument with you, Rabbi—”

“That is true.”

Irritated, Lucy continued, “But there are millions of Moslems and you are smack in the middle of them, and there are just a few of you. Maybe some
politesse
is called for.”

The rabbi guided Lucy out the door with a gentle touch. “Assimilate, in other words. Like you were saying the other night. Be a little nicer, perhaps. Stop it with the everyone-else-is-a-
treyfener
chip on our shoulder, hm?”

Lucy and Rabbi Hersch walked through the tranquil Givat Ram campus toward the university's bus stop. “You know,” Lucy went on, “my tax monies pay for this country's continued existence, and I think it would be politic to respond to my existence politely as one human being living on this planet to another human being in 1990.”

“Interesting point, about the tax monies. You want your money's worth out of Israel, this … this Old Testament theme park here, right? Thank you evvvver so much, Miss Dantan of the Most Holy United States of America, for your selfless contribution to your only friend and strategical ally in the whole of the Middle East, to whom you give allll this money nobly without a thought to your own interests in the world. How can we thank you enough?”

Lucy surrendered. “As I said, you'll win if we argue—”

“That generally falls to the person who's correct.”

Well, thought Lucy, we're into it now. “I can't believe there's not a part of you that doesn't think a nation founded on the basis of Zionism, a Chosen people, a theological Master Race, if you will, isn't racism pure and simple.”

“Of course it's racism,” he said, to the amusement of the students at the bus stop they were approaching. “Any Jew who pretends it's not doesn't know anything. This is big news? The French look after French interests, which are always against Jewish interests—no exceptions. The English do what they do to further the English people. Arabs can be united under a criminal like Nasser or a monster like Hussein like
that,
” he announced, snapping his fingers, “because they imagine their racial interests are being furthered. However, there seems to be no room in your world vision for the Jews to do the same thing. As an Irish-American you ought to know better than most how us-versus-them determines the very texture of Irish life.”

“But it shouldn't.”

“In a perfect world, no. But we're in this one, so until it becomes perfect, if you don't mind so much, the Jews will look out for their own interests, culture, language, people, history, and land we are currently occupying, which happens conveniently this time to be our homeland. We got an art museum, a modern university, we care about reading, poetry, literature, classical music—more than your country, sweetheart—where else in this region do you see anything comparable? We got theater, we got a symphony orchestra. The Islamic world's idea of culture is a public flogging or a big, orchestrated million-person rally for Qaddafi or Hussein or Assad. Hey, burning American flags is great art, right? And those clever chants, ‘Death to America,' ‘Death to Bush,' ‘Jihad! Jihad!' But where were you? Some things about Israel you thought were so terrible, hm?”

“Tribalism.” She took a deep breath. “The reason the blacks are wiping each other out in South Africa right at the first breath of independence and liberation. Sordid, low-minded
tribalism.
” The rabbi was mildly amused at the rhetoric: “It's what cavemen did. It's what the Ku Klux Klan appeals to, and Louis Farrakhan, and Yasser Arafat and Meir Kahane—

“A lot of people hate Kahane in this country. I think he's a pig. But who among the Palestinians hates
their
extremist faction, Abu Nidal, Abu Abbas? Palestinian dissenters speak up, they die. That's the Arab way. Why are the Jews held up to some alpine scale of morality? You never hear Americans whine about Arab atrocities, which are innumerable, innumerable! One punk with a rock gets shot after battering soldiers all day with rocks—I hear the American newcaster already, ‘They were only throwing rocks,' as if a rock couldn't kill you! It's a matter for the U.N.!

“King Hussein of Jordan wiped out 5000 Palestinians who inconvenienced him. I didn't hear a peep out of anybody, let alone the other Arab states who live vicariously through this Arab rabble that's accreted here to sponge off Israeli and Western prosperity. Israel invades Lebanon—granted, a mistake—and there's a massacre of Christians killing Arabs and what do the Jews do? Have a public inquiry to see if Sharon was responsible. You see this kind of conscience anywhere,
any place at all
in the Arab world? Can you imagine a tribunal on human rights from an Arab nation? Die on the spot, I would, if I should hear such a thing! Assad in Syria—he's killed a third of his country. Sadat, America's darling, wrote lavish praise of Hitler and just about did in the Christians there. The emirs in Saudi Arabia, America's new buddies—look at those dictatorships. As a woman, it may interest you to know that you can't go to the suburbs without an official note showing you have the permission of your husband to ride on the public bus. That appeal to you?”

“Rabbi,” she interrupted, “I don't think life in an Arab-run country would be better for anybody in the 20th Century … Where are we going, by the way?”

“My house, and then lunch at Golda's. You who hate us so much should see Golda's, have some gefilte fish, borscht, a blintz—they do a cream-cheese blintz there that would circumcise the heathen…” Lucy noticed the woman standing next to them in the bus stop line hiding a smile.

“I
don't,
” Lucy hissed under her breath, “hate the Jews, and would you stop announcing that to the whole country.”

“Hear O Israel!” began the rabbi, before Lucy playfully hit him on the arm and they got onto the bus. The rabbi dropped in shekels for both of them.

“There,” he said. “A little return on your whopping tax investment, okay?”

Lucy and Rabbi Hersch stood and let an older woman sit down in the last seat. “Are you this wicked with all your students?” she asked.

“Oh, I'm taking it easy on you. This isn't Jewish-strength arguing yet. If I opened up you'd fold like a house of cards.”

Lucy smiled. “Yeah, I bought a copy of your
Not the Messiah
in a bookstore in New Jerusalem this morning.”

The rabbi blanched and lost the smile in his eye. “Oh that. I thought those were all out of print.”

“I bought it used. It's very instructive on how stupid the Christians were to think for a moment that Jesus could be the Messiah—”

“Hey, do me a favor, and gimme your copy, willya? I'll buy it from you. That should never have seen print.”

Lucy discerned he was edgy about this pamphlet, produced twenty years ago. “You make a good case. A bit sarcastic and unkind, perhaps—”

“Please,” he cut her off, “no more of this. Let me buy that book from you.”