The Lies They Tell

by Tuvia Tenenbom

  Aloha.

  • • •

  An email:

  Friend,

  I just made it to Simi Valley, California for tonight’s GOP (Republican) debate and, like so many folks here, I couldn’t be more excited for these Republicans to get up on that stage and tell us what they really feel. I mean, I can say so much about how bad their policies are, but there’s nothing more convincing than hearing it straight from the horse’s mouth.

  Debbie Wasserman Schultz

  Chair, Democratic National Committee

  These two groups, the Democrats and the Republicans, really hate each other.

  And I go to Utah to see America’s most ridiculed: the Mormons. I leave behind the ninety-one-degree weather of Honolulu and fly to the forty-six-degree Salt Lake City. The weather should have been much warmer, since climate change does not stop in Alaska or Hawaii, but in the state of the Mormons the weather is more cautious in playing its tricky games.

  Gate Sixteen

  The most beautiful teenagers are Mormon

  FIRST THING I NOTICE IS THAT SALT LAKE CITY IS MOST LIKELY NOT BLUE. THE evidence is right there at the airport terminal: people can smoke inside the building, in designated areas. This is something that in New York you can only dream of.

  This is not New York. This is another world. Mormons. Joseph Smith. Polygamy. The Book of Mormon. These are just some of the sound bites associated with this city and this state. Sixty-two percent of the people in this state are Mormons. Who are the Mormons? I go out to look for them.

  A stroll around Temple Square and its vicinity in downtown Salt Lake City reveals the most beautiful young girls in the most modest of dresses, the handsomest young boys with the most heavenly of smiles, the cleanest of parking garages worldwide, the finest of flowers on any street anywhere, the nicest of buildings, the most welcoming of shopping malls – and all this I’ve gleaned in my first ten minutes.

  These perfect people are Mormons. The buildings and the properties belong to them. Who are the Mormons? The Mormons, the smiling beauties tell me, are Christians. As simple as that.

  Not Mormons?

  Mormons, they say, is just a nickname.

  What’s the real name?

  Latter-day Saints. These young beauties, I must admit, indeed look like saints, like the beautiful saints in the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City. The only difference between them is that there the beauties are painted on the walls; here they are in the flesh.

  Have I entered the Islamic paradise with its motherlode of sexy virgins? I wish. This is not Arabia; this is Utah.

  These young, the beautiful and the handsome, come in every color. What you could call diversity.

  Which makes me think. In virtually every state I’ve been to thus far, people bragged about the “diversity” in their state, but none included “Mormons” in the list of their diverse groups. In fact, for many a year America’s most elite cultural figures have poked fun at the Mormons in a way in which none would even dream to treat Muslims, for example. Witness America’s theatrical shows, such as the satirical The Book of Mormon or Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, that present Mormonism in the worst light possible.

  There’s a word for them: hypocrites.

  In any case, the beauties here direct me to halls and buildings, to books and missionaries, where I am treated like a king in the hope that I, too, become a man nicknamed Mormon. “Mormon” is derived from the name of an angel named Moroni who one day came to visit a nineteenth-century American by the name of Joseph Smith and led him to golden plates buried in the earth, upon which were written in Reformed Egyptian the book that Joseph later translated, set down and called Book of Mormon.

  That’s the story, the official story. What’s “Reformed Egyptian”? Nobody knows. In what temple or museum may one take a look at the golden plates? None. Why? Because the angel took them with him.

  Similar to Jesus and his grave. You can’t see it, because it’s not there.

  Joseph Smith, born in 1805 and assassinated in 1844, is the founder of the Mormon religion, which today, according to Church sources, numbers fifteen million followers. This American-founded religion has more members than there are Jews.

  Well, not exactly. For the most part, Mormons are direct descendants of Ephraim, son of Joseph from the biblical account of the twelve tribes of Israel, while the Jews are mostly the descendants of the tribe of Judah, the brother of Joseph. In short, both Jew and Mormon come from the biblical Abraham, Joseph’s and Judah’s great-grandpa, who happened to be the first Jew of history. In other words, Mormons and Jews are Israelites, meaning that both are Jewish.

  How do I know that Mormons have anything to do with Ephraim? Well, they write it. Here’s an example, from a 1923 publication called The Improvement Era: “The great majority of those who become members of the Church are literal descendants of Abraham through Ephraim, son of Joseph.”

  And now it’s time to go over some basics. Mormons are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), and the LDS in Utah has a PR department, whose people assigned two members of their team to teach me much about these Israelites. Jesus Christ, they inform me, appeared in the Americas after his resurrection. Love it! No Christian alive or dead has ever come up with a more convincing reason as to why Jesus had to be resurrected. Until Joseph Smith. And he came up with this idea in his twenties.

  Like Jesus, this founder of religion was quite young when he changed the world.

  • • •

  As Christianity is kind of Judaism Plus, Mormonism is Christianity Plus. These “plusses” change a religion from A to Z, but it’s important not to forget their roots.

  Mormons don’t believe in the Trinity, the PR pros also tell me, and they don’t pray to Jesus. They believe, as they explain to me, that God the father, God the son and God the Holy Ghost are separate beings.

  The Trinity, if you were not raised on it, doesn’t make much sense. And Mormonism, in many ways, “fixes” and “improves” those parts that are illogical or problematic in Christianity, just as Christianity has tried to do with Judaism, for example, by replacing God’s destroyed temple in Jerusalem with the Son of God.

  Another Mormon improvement on Christianity is “proxy baptism,” meaning posthumous baptism. How does it work?

  It is explained to me by various believers in the antechamber of the Salt Lake Temple, while I stand facing a scale model of the Temple structure. Down below the Temple, the baptismal bath stands over twelve oxen, symbolizing the twelve tribes of Israel. There, a living person assumes the identity of a dead person and, fully clothed, jumps into the bath and turns the dead person into a Mormon. Something like that.

  I want to see it taking place in practice but I’m not allowed to enter the Temple proper. To be more exact: no one is allowed into the Temple unless they have a “recommend” card. I have a Visa card, but the guards, dressed all in white like doctors in lab coats, do not accept Visa. They want Recommend. How could I get such a card? Well, I have to become Mormon first, and then have a distinguished member of the community recommend me.

  I try to get the PR folks to recommend me, except the guards seem not to believe that PR people have the credentials to undertake anything sacred.

  To those who believe in Jesus, proxy baptism is actually a great idea. Most Christians believe that people who have not been baptized in life will not enter paradise, which is a very cruel idea. Think of the dead infants or people who, let’s say, died on their way to be baptized. Isn’t this cruel?

  Thank heaven for Mormons!

  It is for this reason that Mormons have invested millions upon millions of dollars in genealogy centers around the globe: to baptize the dead. You see, to baptize the dead you have to know their names. And for this, you need computers with loads of data.

  For the most part, non-Mormons don’t have an issue with such centers, but there are exceptions. Jews, for example.

  Historically, Jews have been murdered in great
er numbers than most other peoples. In just the last century, six million of them were slaughtered in a mere few years. Which, as you might guess, is a good reason to keep many Mormons very, very busy.

  And indeed, for many years the Mormons quarreled with the Jews over the Mormons’ practice of baptizing Jewish victims of the Holocaust, effectively Mormonizing millions of dead Jews. But after a long-lasting dispute with American Jewish organizations, LDS gave its word that no proxy baptism would ever take place again.

  Do they keep their word? Maybe yes, maybe no.

  I schlep the polished LDS PR people to the Family History Library across the street from Temple Square. There, I have been told, records of deceased people and the dates of their baptisms can be found. As we walk in, an LDS attendant shows me to a chair in a room packed with computers. I sit down and type the name of my deceased great-grandfather, a founder of a Hasidic dynasty in Poland. Believe it or not, the Mormons baptized him.

  The faces of the two PR people turn white, but I’m not here to torture them. I turn to them, stretch my hand out and say: Shake, please, the hand of your Mormon brother.

  If I had to sum up my experiences today, they would be very simple: the Mormons are Jews, and I am a Mormon.

  The funniest element of this summation is that each one of us, as far as I know, is fully sober. The only drink I’ve had today is Diet Coke; Mormons are not allowed to have any alcohol, not to mention coffee, tea, cola, tobacco or cannabis.

  • • •

  Outside, there is a bank called Zions Bank. It originated, like everything here, with Joseph Smith, who one day decided that Zion actually refers to America.

  How did he get the idea that Zion should be in America? Mormons, you should first know, believe in the Bible, in which the word Zion appears more than one hundred times. (That’s where you get Zionist from.) Zion is in Israel, but Joseph Smith had a different idea in mind. Zion is not in the Middle East – Zion is here.

  Based on Mormon writings, it seems that Joseph Smith mistranslated the word Zion to mean “the pure in heart,” and Mormons are pure in heart, as everybody knows. And they are in America.

  Bingo.

  His translation, sorry, is not even close. But Joseph Smith is far from being the only one guilty of mistranslation. Mistranslations of Hebrew occur also in the New Testament, and to date billions of people do not know it.

  Are the Mormons Christian? At the core of Mormon faith and doctrine, which the Mormons would rather not share with strangers, is this one-liner, composed many years ago by the fifth Mormon prophet, Lorenzo Snow: “As man is, God once was; as God is, man may become.” This idea, that God was once a man, makes Mormonism unique in the monotheistic world, though it is figuratively similar to the Christian notion of Son of God in the form of man.

  Whatever the case, I ask the PR people if they could connect me with someone higher up in the church hierarchy. They say that, very sadly and unfortunately, nobody higher up is available for the foreseeable future. In PR lingo, this means: “Over my dead body!” They really, really don’t want me to see any higher-ups.

  Why? Because this is what PR is about: hide the higher-ups from the probing eyes of journalists. More or less what my smoking partner told me in Chicago.

  Between you and me, the LDS establishment reminds me of the Obama administration. Both attach me to beautiful ladies and handsome men, and both try to make sure that every step I make is supervised.

  As far as I see it, PR is America’s biggest disease; and the better a PR team is, the worse the outcome. Faced with well-oiled PR machinery such as that of this hugely successful religion, or of the White House, I do my best to circumvent the system.

  And so I finagle my way into the office of William Atkins, LDS legal genius. What I want to know is just a little detail. Jews have been telling me that Mormons strongly support Israel, yet the Mormon Church keeps quiet about it. I want to know what the real story is.

  William’s official title is associate general counsel, and he was the one who delivered the Church’s response to the Supreme Court’s decision to allow gay marriage: “I think you’re going to see a rapid development in erosion of religious freedoms,” he said in a speech at Brigham Young University. Will William be as clear about Israel?

  Being that we are both Jewish, or Mormon, I ask William why it is that the Mormons do not publicly support their Jewish sibling, Israel.

  William answers that, as a matter of policy, the Church does not get involved in anything political.

  You believe in the Bible, I remind him, and in the Bible it is written that God has given the Holy Land to the Jews. Correct or incorrect?

  William, legal genius that he is, disagrees. First, he declares that “I love the Palestinians as people as much as I love the Israelis.” This done, he answers my question: “No. The Holy Land was given by God to the twelve tribes.”

  The Jews come from the twelve tribes, right?

  “One of the tribes!”

  Well, that includes the Jews. No?

  “Israelites!”

  For him, I assume, this means that the “Holy Land” belongs to some kind of “Israelites” but not to the Jews. And so I point out to him that the name “Jews” actually appears in the Bible, for example in the Book of Esther, and that from the Bible’s perspective “Israelites” and “Jews” are the same.

  His initial response is: “Hmmm.” Then there is a pause. And then he says: “The promises of the Holy Land were given to the House of Israel!”

  Of the twelve tribes, ten were lost to history and only about two remain. Wouldn’t you say? You, the Mormons, who come from the tribe of Ephraim, and the Jews, who come from the tribe of Judah. That’s why they are called “Jews.” And so, the Holy Land then belongs to the Mormons and the Jews but not to the Arabs. Isn’t this so?

  “The Jews are co-owners!”

  When the other tribes reappear, if they do, they will be welcome to join, but as of now only the Jews, and the Mormons, remain of the twelve tribes. Right?

  It is only at this point that this higher-up succumbs: “Yes. Legally God gave the land to the Jews.”

  Then, from a biblical perspective, the land does not belong to the Palestinians.

  “No.”

  Why, then, will the Mormon Church not take a stand on this issue?

  “Because some people don’t believe that the current State of Israel represents the prophetic Jewish tribes.”

  Forget that. Theologically speaking, who should inherit the land?

  “The theological answer: the Jews. But you can’t take that and project it on politics.”

  Why not? Is the Mormon Church afraid to stand on the side of God?

  It is here that William shows his genius. Of course, he says, God has given the land to the Jews, and this is also part of the Mormon faith, but LDS won’t take a stand on the issue because the Church doesn’t want to say that the “present government of Israel represents the Jewish people.”

  Forget the government; the government does not represent anybody. My question was, and is, about the people. Would LDS say in public that the “present people now living in Israel” – and I’m referring to the Jews here – live in a land that belongs to them? William has no answer. Not now. He says he’ll get back to me. When will he get back to me? As far as I can tell, it will be at least one day after my great-grandfather rises from the dead as a Mormon.

  So, here’s my message to the Jews: If you believe that in time of need you can rely on the Mormons, forget it. But, for the record, the Mormons have no plans to demand the land. Their founder, Joseph Smith, took Zion with him to America.

  As I am about to depart from William, he makes sure that I don’t leave his office empty-handed. He gives me a typewritten book that details the history of his family from 1883 to 1967, and which includes poems and family pictures.

  How sweet! Here’s how one poem starts: “It was wonderful to wonder / In the place we called the Flat. T’was a little bit o
f heaven, / For a child with an old straw hat.” A lovely man, this William!

  • • •

  I go to a service in a Mormon church, called a “ward,” and watch in amusement as adult participants fill out attendance sheets. This church keeps its believers tight!

  What’s in the news today? Back at my hotel room, at the DoubleTree hotel, I turn on the TV, select CNN, and there I see the rebroadcast of the second Republican presidential debate. I didn’t watch it while it took place, so I watch it now. Guess which word pops up over and over?

  Israel.

  As if these candidates were running for office in Jerusalem.

  For whatever reason, “Israel” is deep on the mind of many Americans, as is the case with too many Europeans. Why is this? Ask Dr. Sigmund Freud. And if you meet him, if he’s resurrected like Jesus Christ and Elvis Presley, I have another question that I would like you to ask him: Why is it that almost all of those who say that they believe in climate change are also pro-Palestine?

  I keep hearing this from people, this bizarre relationship between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and climate change, and am amazed every time anew.

  In any case, Salt Lake City is beautiful but Moab is much nicer. Not that I have seen it yet; I’m just repeating here what some guy told me earlier today. What’s in Moab? I asked him.

  “The Arches Park right next to it,” he answered.

  He seemed like someone who knows what he’s talking about, and I decide to trust him. I rent a car (yes, Versa again) and drive with the new Japanese to Moab.

  • • •

  The ride from Salt Lake City to Moab is one of the loveliest I’ve driven in this country.

  It’s not the first time I’ve said this, right? It’s a beautiful country, my dear, and I’m taken by it.