by Norman Rush
“Emunah is the whole of it, in the message of Jesus the Jew. We must make this clear to, to …”
A new voice broke in. “To the multitudes.”
This was Kerekang’s first intervention. There was more to come. Kerekang’s tone was wry, but carefully wry.
Morel continued. “Yes, the multitudes. Oh yes. Emunah … Please notice that every act that is being urged by Jesus is meant to amplify, in a believing population, the proportion of it, the part of it, that resembles a mass of distressed and neglected but trusting children. When he tells his followers not to take any thought for the morrow, for example, not to think ahead about where the next meal is coming from, he is recreating in that attitude the situation of a child unable to get its own food and depending on the goodwill of the family under the control of the sovereign father. We’ll see this over and over, clearly shown, when we come to examine, when Themba comes to examine, the parables and proverbs attributed to Jesus. But the overall picture here is unmistakable—Jesus is engaged in an experiment in collective emunah with the Jews of Palestine, conjuring or coaxing them into the shape of an enormous baby in order to bring God downstairs to tend it and change the world forever in the bargain.
“What was moving in the mind of Jesus to lead him to this we can only guess. But it seems likely that what he sought through mass emunah was to undo the sin of Adam, whose disobedience plunged humanity into death and misery and labor and pain in childbirth for women and on and on, undo it by turning disobedience into its opposite, perfect obedience, spectacular compliance with the will and whims of Yahweh.
“Emunah! We must make ourselves call things by their right names, comrades. If you were asked to come into a church so that you might join others in groveling, would you go in? No, but if they call it worship, you go.
“Now once we can see that the whole work of Jesus was this campaign to pump up eruptions of emunah, we can then see that it must follow that, correctly considered, there is no moral instruction to be gotten from his message, from his original message. Jesus tells those who would truly follow him that their duties to him, their duties to emulate him, are greater than, for example, their most sacred duties to their parents, such as burying them speedily when they die.
“What we see out of all this is that every act you must do is instrumental. No good act is done for its own sake, because it is good. None. Not one. Every act is done to flatter and arouse the imaginary father to descend to earth! No, more exactly, every act is an attempt to shame God into taking action. Jesus knows God’s jealous and murderous and capricious side, his murderous vanity even when it comes to his closest servants. He punishes his beloved agent Moses with death over some insanely minor shortcoming, depriving him of the privilege of entering the promised land with the people he has led through the wilderness for forty years. Jesus knows all about God. And he knows perfectly well also that God’s acts of benefit are for the most part generic, as in letting the sun shine for all and sundry, while his enmity is specific, personal in a way, and often petty, as when he condemns to death some perfectly nice Jewish children for the sin of teasing Elijah about being bald, as we discussed. He has them eaten up by a bear! He is a jealous God. He says so himself. Jesus knows. He knows God sent the serpent.
“No, this emunah … ah we are so pathetic … no one more than Jesus himself. So here is the task he has given to himself …
“On the one hand it is to trick God into acting by calling up surges of unsustainable piety. And on the other hand it is to trick the people into feats of piety by misrepresenting God as an angel of goodness and loving kindness. The sleight of hand Jesus performs is everywhere. Look closely! He deceives even himself as he goes on about love and forbearance, devising to trick God downstairs through acts of organized innocence, get him to come downstairs and crush the shit out of the enemies of the Jews. Through the weakness and need of his people God will be induced to crush not only the Roman oppressors but also the bad Jews who doubted the message of Jesus.
“He is secretive, this Jesus. He is Prometheus, in what he attempts.
“His evasions are stupendous. He calls men to imitate God, the famous Imitatio Dei we spoke about. The sheep in the churches nod and think this is fine, this must be ethics. But look closely. Jesus says be like God in performing feats of giving and forbearance and ask nothing in return, expect no compensation. But this is not like God at all. God requires. God will forgive your debts only if you forgive the debts of others. There is nothing unconditional here. God is famous, notorious, for laying down conditions—ask Lot’s wife. God is continually setting out conditions, a chief one being, and you can find it in his dealings with Abraham and Job, never question my motives. What does ‘Judge not, lest ye be judged’ mean? It means imitate God only in those ways that do not intrude on God’s power to judge and punish. Leave the punishing to Daddy God. It would be arrogant not to, because God likes to punish, consign people to hell or misfortune for their shortcomings. Making judgments is the province of adults, and if God is to like us enough to come downstairs, we must remain as children. ‘God loves a terrified face,’ it says in the Psalms.
“This is a God who loves deals, covenants, all of that. No, the famous Imitatio Dei is a confidence trick, another one, to flatter God that you are acting as he, in his sunnier moments, may, at times.
“This is a complete story, let us never forget, from beginning to end it’s all there.
“The story of Jesus the Jew is the story of an experiment in mystical mass psychology that fails. It fails. It is a complete story whose end features the disciples of Jesus denying him, and running away, and he himself, the poor man, asking Yahweh why he has forsaken him, why he has not come downstairs, alas, alas. Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? are the hardest words to hear. The author of the experiment is being tortured to death and he says My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? And then he dies. That’s it.
“I am sure it went, with poor Jesus, after his time with poor John the Baptist, what more can we do, we Jews? Well, we can be children, we can be worms, we can be spat on, hit, we can double the length of the errands the Romans require us to run, we can be pathetic …
“Well, I have to stop because … I have to stop …
“But let me not stop until I point out how perfectly and how completely this embarrassing experiment represents the falling back into childishness we find at the heart of every religion. I won’t go into it right now, but there are three ways to get salvation if you’re a Hindu, and one of the ways is through bakhti, which is identical with the emunah of Jesus the Jew. Do you understand that this falling back is universal, in religions? Take fasting. You approach God with your stomach rumbling, how could a father not help? Celibacy. What a good idea. Make yourself presexual, just like a baby. Shave your head, like the Buddhist nuns and monks. Be as bald as a baby. In both Matthew and Mark, remember, we are given to understand that in the resurrected state we take neither husband nor wife, but live sexless, like angels. Rending garments is a good idea! … an ill-clad child will move God’s heart. Shrink yourself up when you approach God, make yourself as small as a child, lower your head, your eyes, fall on your knees. Speak in tongues! Nice idea. God might think you’re babbling like a baby. Adorable idea. And be sure not to approach any venue God might inhabit if you are less than perfectly clean. A soiled child does not delight a father. Slaughter your best cows, put the first best part of the harvest right there on the altar, and be sure to be mournful, be bereft, as you do this, because what God needs is not the soul of another cow or the perfume of a sheaf of wheat you just cut … no, it’s the misery that parting with these goods makes you feel. And remember, only the best for our maker, only unblemished doves, only the best. God savors your misery, not the smell of roasting kine. God has everything already. By definition. And burnt offerings, by the way, is yet one more piece of priestly trickery, because nicely roasted would be more like it, and because the priests got fine dining out of the offerings until th
ere was a fuss about it and more got distributed outside the temple, but that’s another story.
“Jesus was an innovator. The emunah rising up to God through the conduit of the temple during regular sacrificial ceremonies was not enough, obviously. Now keep firmly in your mind the difference between John the Baptist’s teshuvah, repentance, which accompanied the act of sacrifice, and Jesus’s emunah, childish love and awe. Teshuvah was not enough. Teshuvah was saying you were sorry and wouldn’t do it again if you could help it. But emunah is consciousness of weakness, including weaknesses leading to sin, while you are going on about things, even repeating bad acts like collecting taxes for the Romans and occasionally overindulging, going on, but at least feeling rotten and low about it.
“Jesus makes a new package. He proposes to take the satisfaction God got from the regular observers of Torah, their routine piety, and add to that the emunah of the sinners and the screwed, trapped in their situations for one reason or another, and create a blaze of feeling that would surely rouse God to action, especially when he added to the mix his own personal performance of absolute trust … which he was clearly contriving to happen … in the form of placing himself in peril of death.
“I need to stop. And so, well, the point has been made. I keep thinking of things to add. Make yourself as miserable as a child in distress, preferably a male child. Restrictions on the presence of women at groveling services used to be practically universal. You can search the scriptures until you go blind and never encounter the phrase daughter of God once. By the way, if you’re a Hindu, a gift you can bring to the goddess Devi is sleepiness. Certain rituals you attend in a sleep-deprived state because of course what could stir the attention of a patrimorph or matrimorph for that matter more than the sight of a sleepy baby? So. Make yourself miserable, gash yourself, mortify yourself, lick up crumbs of the host off the floor like the Jansenists, sleep on a plank, wear a hair shirt. Poor babies!
“About women, though … You know, look around, so far we have no women with us in this work. But that will change. There is … I have a woman I think is ready. Or soon will be. I think so. Gosiame, we can eat now.”
Ray wanted to hit the tape player. He turned the machine off, his hands shaking. What woman? he thought.
What woman was Morel talking about? Who was she? Had this gotten past him the first time he’d listened to the tape? What woman was he talking about?
He got up and began pacing around the house. The possibility that Morel was referring to Iris was outrageous, making Iris a priestess of reason or whatever they called it, irreligion?
He decided it had to be a Motswana woman, but who?
That wasn’t it. He knew it wasn’t. He wanted to demolish something.
He went into the bathroom and sorted through the painkillers until he found the ones with codeine, which he took three of. That was the best thing about Africa, the paracetamol and the other preparations loaded with codeine you could get over the counter.
He pushed his shorts down and sat on the toilet to urinate. His legs were weak. He had never urinated sitting down except as an adjunct act, in his whole life, he believed.
He was remote from Morel’s arguments, completely. He wondered what that meant. Morel was passionate about his theories, his discoveries, obviously and to say the least.
But he himself had gone through these questions a long time ago and reached conclusions and moved on to other things. That was what he wanted to think. But he suspected that the truth of it was that he hadn’t considered the questions Morel was raising. How much truth there was in one side versus the other was presumably important. There was his hatred of Morel and that was real. But the rest of it was not real to him. It was taking place behind thick glass.
Some complex process he was no longer interested in had disposed him to be where he was and doing what he was doing and, on the whole, feeling okay about it. If he wanted to, he could feel slightly bemused at finding himself cast as some sort of defender of the faith, surrounded by passionate questioners eagerly biting away at the pillars of regular life. The idea of going down, down into the foundations of life and X-raying the historical accidents that had led to a world not completely satisfactory was unreasonable to him. It made him tired.
His attention was on the foreground, where it had to be. It was where he lived. Anyway it was a luxury to be able to devote yourself like Morel to hermeneutic orgies, not bad as a term for what Morel was doing. Resnick would appreciate the phrase, but nobody else.
The fact was that he had his own life to save, his and Iris’s. That was it. That was it. That was all there was.
…
He had come almost to the part he wanted to hear again, urgently, the rebellion. It was simple to follow. There were only two voices, Kerekang first and Morel second and then in unbroken alternation like that to the end. What was nice about it, apart from the drama, was that it had been unexpected. We love the unexpected, he thought. There was no question his own aversion to boredom was abnormally high and that this aversion explained a lot of the attraction that working for the agency held for him. Justifying working for the agency was turning into a compulsion, lately, and he resented it. Still, it was true that boredom kills. When he looked around at what others did for a living he felt like a Martian.
He wanted to be sharp for this. The pills were making him vibrate. They were Iris’s pills. He was used to having to make a case for taking them. It was a comic ritual. She knew he only proposed taking them so he could get sympathy for a particularly bad headache. He could perfectly well take them without saying anything. It was a ritual. We need rituals, he thought. Morel was blind.
He was fast-forwarding and rewinding, searching for the exact beginning of Kerekang’s eruption, which followed Morel’s rather sneering deconstruction of the Sermon on the Mount. Apparently there was nothing to be said for it at all, and the bulk of it was retroactive ventriloquism from parties unknown, followers of Paul. He had to admit he had learned something in the interesting-if-true category, to the effect that the true reason the Lord’s Prayer had been commended to believers was for its brevity. The idea was not to go on with the long, rambling, free-form prayers characteristic of traditional Jewish worship and also of the pagans. And the deeper idea, in line with the rest of Morel’s analysis of the original religion of Jesus as a scheme to trick and flatter God, was to avoid irritating him with lengthy petitions in consideration of the fact that he already knew what everybody wanted, being omniscient. So it was about brevity. But there was something peculiar about Morel’s approach to spreading irreligion in Botswana. He could use some advice. Ray had an opinion about Morel’s standpoint. Morel was being pretty cavalier about actually existing Christianity, the living varieties of the beliefs that people today were bothering to adhere to. It was as if, after proving to his own satisfaction that the original ideas of Jesus constituted a fantasy form of Jewish fundamentalism, that that was enough, should be enough for anybody. The subsequent misappropriations and misconstruings of these original ideas, which turned into Christianity in all its branches, seemed not to be of interest to him. Where were the Trinity and sacerdotal celibacy, what have you, auricular confession, full or partial immersion? It was these misappropriations and misunderstandings and the denominations built around them that were now front and center, on any sensible view of the matter. Yet Morel seemed to be ignoring the beliefs of live, walking-around Christians, in all their particularities. Although maybe that would come later, in other presentations. Here was Kerekang, with his fine voice, his inflections showing his long exposure to British English.
“Rra, yah, you see, I did not wish to speak. But I feel I must, if I may. If my brother Themba says go, and if you won’t mind it, rra.”
“Of course. For sure. This is what we like.”
“And does my brother Themba say I may go, as well?”
“Themba says fine.”
“So then, rra … all you have said may be very true, I think, as to the
thoughts of Jesus. I can believe you are right.”
“Well, thanks, my brother. I appreciate that. Of course the general idea of what religion is I take from Freud … ‘God is an exalted father, nothing more.’ So I am in his shadow, and unfortunately he didn’t know how much stronger his interpretation would have been if he had fully appreciated neoteny, this period of helplessness we experience in infancy. And Freud went off the track in many silly ways, it has to be said. But when I apply this basic truth, God as an exalted father, to the history of Christianity, I get a certain result.”
“But, rra, continuing as to Jesus, and what has come of his life, and even admitting how greatly he was mistaken in some of his hopes … Rra, this I know will not be pleasing to you, but you must hear it, because you shall hear it from others … And I am not happy to say these things, you understand.
“But let us say he believed untruths. Some untruths. And from these untruths some people, misled, built up some tales that have come to us, from time past.
“From time past we have a tale that there was a man sent by God.
“And this tale says that this man said, as to the poor, that they are beautiful in God’s eyes.
“And from this, if you wish, you can think, Ai! … then as God is loving them, it is perhaps best if we can love them too, if all could do so …”
“Hold it! Wait.” This was Morel, agitated. “Wait, yes, but we are talking about a myth, a myth … tlhamane …”
“Oh surely so, rra. A tale told by fairies. Ditlhamane, many myths, we are talking about.”
“Well just so we keep that in mind.”
“Ehe, righto! And this man says you must not be ashamed if you are sick or you are too shy, because God is a friend to you above the rich.
“And you the rich, for shame, you cannot pass through the eye of a needle so easily as can the poor.
“So we can see that God is saying the rich must feel shame, which is what we would wish in this country today. With us, the rich have no shame. They can just sweep out the poor, brush them away, if they please to.