The Penitent

by Isaac Bashevis Singer

  But when I asked the old man what I could do for him, he smiled a toothless smile and said, “I have everything I need, God be praised.”

  “Are you watching your health?”

  “The doctors want me to go to the hospital, but I don’t want to.”

  I knew his reasons. He didn’t trust them to serve kosher food.

  He said, “I’ll live as long as I’m destined to live.”

  “Rabbi, I can get you a private room in a hospital and good doctors. They’ll watch over you and—”

  The rabbi’s only response was, “Et,” meaning, I am not so sure … I can do without it … This is not our way of doing things … I have my doubts about it … and many similar such expressions of religious skepticism about worldly promises and means of imminent succor.

  This et meant to say that it didn’t pay to go to all that trouble.

  The rebbetzin came in, a woman the rabbi’s age, bent and wrinkled like old women used to be in my time, and wearing a bonnet.

  I told her what I proposed to do for her husband and she said, “In the hospitals they’ll start in with the tests, and those tests will kill him altogether.”

  She knew what she was talking about. I had already heard from other sick people that when certain doctors get hold of a patient he becomes a guinea pig on which they experiment. They draw blood from him and subject him to all kinds of suffering. Often these tests do more harm than the illness itself. The rebbetzin was the rabbi’s second wife. The first had perished along with their children in Europe.

  The rabbi began to tell me what he had suffered under the Nazis. His beard had been shorn. He had been made to dig graves and do other heavy labor. He had been beaten, too. He had said his confession each day, ready to die, but somehow the soul had refused to leave the body. I asked him whether he was connected with the orthodox organization in America and he again said, “Et …”

  No, this wasn’t the kind of rabbi the modern orthodox in America could send to conferences, have his picture taken, and let him raise funds at banquets where big budgets were being prepared. This was an old-fashioned Jew who needed nothing besides a glass of tea, some oat groats, a few old books, and a minyan. He had no urge to provide piety to the world or even to the community of Israel. He read no newspapers. He didn’t know the kind of Yiddish that the modern orthodoxy had taken over from the unbelievers. He spoke like my grandfather and like your grandfather. The few Jews who supported him were just like him. Jewishness was to them a private thing, something between them and the Almighty.

  I promised the rabbi that I’d come back in the evening and he nodded and thanked me. It was very hard to assemble a minyan.

  I gave the rebbetzin a few dollars and she took them hesitantly and wished me many blessings. All America, all the Gentile and Jewish organizations kept yelling, “Give, give, give!” They put up buildings, hired more and more employees, banged away on typewriters, sought publicity. They all had one goal—success—whether they built a theater or a yeshiva, a university or a Torah Center, a summer camp or a ritual bath. But this heir to old Jewishness knew that money could not save or fortify Jewishness. The saints and geonim had come out of old study houses, yeshivas from which they went forth to different homes for their daily meals. Magnificent buildings, efficient secretaries, ringing telephones, and aggressive fund-raisers could produce only what they themselves represented: tumult and superficiality.

  6

  After I left the rabbi’s house and walked the down-town streets, I got the feeling that it would be best if I remained somewhere close by, found a room or a small apartment in the neighborhood. I could pray three times a day with the minyan, and there was a vegetarian restaurant on Delancey Street. I walked past stores selling prayer books, prayer shawls, phylacteries, ritual garments, mezuzahs. Since the so-called new Jewishness was actually the same as worldliness—that is to say, full of falsehood, greed, and vanity—I had to return to the old Jewishness, which was newer than the newest of the new. I went into a store and picked out two holy books that happened to catch my eye: The Path of the Righteous by Moshe Haim Luzzatto and The Voice of Elijah, a Commentary on Proverbs by the Vilna Gaon. Afterward I went to the restaurant on Delancey Street and ordered a vegetarian meal. Enough slaughter of innocent creatures, enough gorging on the flesh and blood of others! The waiter brought me rolls and a plate of groats, beans, and mushrooms, all delicious. Why eat meat when there were such tasty dishes around?

  As I ate, I glanced through the books. Whatever page I turned to, I encountered wisdom, not the “wisdom” dispensed by psychoanalysts, with their wild, unfounded theories and farfetched conclusions. The sum total of their teachings always was that someone else was guilty. The father had been too strict or the mother too despotic. They seized hold of a dream and probed it for all the answers to the patient’s problems. Every page they wrote was full of not only contradictions but stupidity. The holy books, on the other hand, exuded a knowledge of mankind. Every word was precisely to the point. When I considered that the Freudians were deemed wise and innovative and these holy books obsolete, I had to laugh. How perverse modern man is! All he wants is to violate nature, and when it resists, he runs to psychiatrists for help.

  Well, but what next? Where would I go from here? I asked myself.

  Until now, the Evil One had been silent for some time, but now it got its voice back.

  “Go home!” it commanded. “It’s your apartment, your furniture. If you want to rid yourself of Celia, get a lawyer. No judge can force a husband to live with a wife he hates. In the worst instance, you’ll pay her alimony for a couple of years. Call your partners. There’s no reason in the world why you should leave them your business and become a homeless wanderer. If you want to be a pious Jew, you can do this in your own home. You don’t have to leave America. There’s no lack of synagogues, holy books, or rabbis here. The rabbi in whose house you prayed is a dying man and there are no more like him. That which Moshe Haim Luzzatto and the Vilna Gaon say may be all good and wise, but when a Hitler or a Stalin comes along, he squashes the Jews into dust and no one stands up for them. If you didn’t have a pocketful of money right now, you’d have to stand out in the cold and beg.”

  The Evil Spirit, or the beast within me, argued further: “No, there are no more faithful wives, nor are there faithful husbands either. And you must come to terms with the notion that sex must be shared. There’s no such thing anymore as sexual private property. In a sense, it’s better this way. Faithfulness caused husbands and wives to grow tired of each other. It’s like constantly eating the same dish. There’ll come a time when every man will have dozens of women and every woman dozens of men. Each side will gain a lot of experience, and every meeting between husband and wife will become more interesting, piquant, and novel. Jealousy isn’t an instinct but something you acquire. You can liberate yourself from it, and it opens up countless new perspectives, new experiences and satisfactions.”

  The Devil remarked: “I’d bet that Celia is searching for you right now, and phoning, and that she misses you. The fact that she slept with that old professor was nothing more than a whim, maybe a wish to revenge herself for your affairs, or a result of boredom. She’ll be more interesting tonight. She’ll embrace you in a different way, she’ll show you new ways of love … As for Liza, you needn’t take that so hard either. She’s alone and she looks forward to your visits. She is a passionate woman. Since people need different foods, new clothes, new plays, and new books, why shouldn’t they want new experiences in the most important areas of all, love and sex? You, Joseph Shapiro, won’t make the world over. If that’s the way things are everywhere, it’s only a sign that this is the course of man’s history, or God’s plan.”

  That’s how the Devil within me moralized, and the words sounded so persuasive at that time that I was ready to grab a cab home. I longed for my apartment, my bed, my telephone, my comforts. I was anxious to see the morning mail. Checks had probably come for me. Maybe t
here was a telegram.

  The truth was that I had no place to go and nothing to do with myself. I hadn’t slept much and I felt tired. I yearned for my bed. “Go home! Go home!” the Evil Spirit commanded. “Lie down, sleep, and rest up. Don’t become a living corpse. It’s nice to see such things on stage or read them in books, but if you do them in real life, you become a bum, a beggar, a forgotten man. There’s no reason in the world why you should take revenge on yourself for the wrongs committed by others.”

  I was already in such a state that I began to look for an empty cab. One came by and I hailed it. I got in and the driver asked, “Where to?”

  I wanted to give him the address of my home, but instead I said, “Kennedy Airport.”

  I rested my head against the cab wall and closed my eyes. In that moment I realized that to remain in New York was to do exactly what the Evil Spirit wanted. If I wished to divorce myself from Satan and his host, I had to leave my environs.

  I had dealt the Evil Spirit a blow and I savored the taste of victory. No, I wanted neither Celia’s nor Liza’s apologies, nor their embraces. The Jew within me had been aroused. Generations of Jews cried out from within me: “Flee from this abomination! Run from the culture of Hitler and Stalin! Escape from a civilization that is a slaughterhouse and brothel! Flee from women who live like whores and demand to be loved and honored. Keep away from the abominable and from what resembles it.”

  And as the cab glided over the New York streets, I heard generations of Jews scolding me: “What’s happened to you? What kind of mud have you fallen into? That’s just the way the Nazis lived. This was what they preached. It was their wives and sweethearts who sold themselves to the American soldiers for a box of chocolates, a pack of cigarettes, or a dollar.”

  As the cab approached Kennedy, the driver asked me what airline I wanted and I named the first one that came to mind. I paid him, and carrying my small satchels and the two books, I went inside the terminal. I went up to a clerk who happened to be free, and when he asked me where I was going, I said, “To Israel.”

  “You have a ticket?”

  “No, I want to buy one.”

  “May I see your passport?”

  I showed him the passport and he asked, “Where’s your luggage?”

  And I replied, “I’m carrying it in my hands.”

  At the same time, I had the feeling that I was reading this out of some book. My life had turned into a story.

  He filled out a ticket for me and I paid with traveler’s checks. I couldn’t get a direct route this time of day, but I got a ticket to Rome, where I could transfer to a flight to Tel Aviv. It was that simple.

  Generations of Jews had fled from inquisitions, executioners, gallows, pyres. They had escaped to other enemies, other gallows, other inquisitions. Thank God, I had lived long enough for the Jews to have found their own home. No one was after me and I had enough money to last me for years if I didn’t live like a wastrel. I knew that heavenly forces were helping me. Perhaps thousands of others like me nursed the same dreams, but they had to be satisfied with dreaming.

  I wanted to board the plane as quickly as possible. I felt the need to sever myself physically from that which I despised.

  I sat for a half hour inside the gate, waiting for my plane. For a while I stopped thinking about myself and my fate. I looked at the other passengers. What were their reasons for traveling? What were they seeking in Rome? Some of them were Italians, others were blond and Nordic-looking. A few of them looked like Jews. Each one had his reason, but I was sure that none of them had experienced what I had. Mine was surely a unique case. Jews had gone to Israel before, but these had been other Jews, in other circumstances. I sat there astounded that this was happening to me and wondering where I had gotten the strength to do what I was doing. It’s true that I had lived through many adventures and faced many dangers during the Nazi years, but then I had been driven by need, by hunger, and by fear, and now I was doing something of my own free will. The Jew in me suddenly gained the courage to spit at all the idolatries.

  After a while, I heard the boarding call. I had been assigned a seat on the aisle. I sat down, and presently a young woman took the window seat. Aha! The Devil had prepared a temptation for me. It’s characteristic of Satan that he never gets tired, never capitulates. One holy book says that even when a person is on his deathbed, Satan comes and tries to lure him into atheism and blasphemy. There is far greater knowledge of mankind in this statement than in all the ponderous volumes of all Freudians, Jungians, Adlerians.

  7

  At first, I didn’t know whether the young woman was Jewish or not. I had decided not to speak to her. I had two precious books with me and I looked into one of them. At the same time I managed to steal glances at my neighbor. Her complexion was olive and she had black hair and dark eyes. She might have been a Jewish girl, or possibly Italian or even French. What do they call it?—the “Mediterranean type.” She wore a short-sleeved dress cut quite low. She held a crocodile-skin handbag on her lap. I noticed a ring with a big diamond on her finger. She also carried a fashion magazine and some kind of university edition. You didn’t need special powers of observation to figure out that this was what they call an intelligent person. She quickly buried herself in the book and I noticed that she was reading something by Sartre, the alleged French philosopher, writer, and formulator of existentialism, which no one understands since it is so vague and full of contradictions. Aha, so you seek the answer to the eternal questions, I thought to myself. Or maybe you need this material for a thesis.

  I leafed through The Path of the Righteous, and even as I tasted the sanctity and wisdom of this holy book, part of my brain conjectured about the female next to me. If a dying man can think about idolatry, why can’t a newly minted penitent wonder about a female? The Devil within me said: “If Moshe Haim Luzzatto himself were sitting here, he might entertain some lusty thoughts, too. He was still a young man when he died, and who persecuted him? Those so-called pious Jews, God’s Cossacks.” She smelled of eau de Cologne, chocolate, and other scents enticing to a male. I was reading about abstinence and sacred matters, and a corner of my brain fantasized about striking up an acquaintance with her and going with her to a hotel in Rome. I recalled the expression “a vessel of shame and disgrace.” Yes, that’s what the body was—a vessel of degradation. I remember my father once quoting to me from a rabbi. That rabbi—I don’t recall who it was—once said: “The Evil Spirit is so brazen he would urge a venerable rabbi in a white robe to have an affair with a married woman.”

  I made a solemn vow to myself not to address her, not even to look at her. Soon the airplane would be taking off, and the frightful possibility existed that in ten minutes we would both be in the other world. Disasters occurred frequently and people were crushed or burned within seconds. As eager as today’s man is for the material pleasures, so does he constantly risk his life—just because of these pleasures. He literally lays down his life for the merest chance of enjoyment. Well, but the passengers weren’t thinking of this. They chatted, prepared to order drinks, leaned back against little pillows. Others glanced at the afternoon newspaper, at the stock-market quotations. The stewardesses, dressed in such a way as to arouse the male passengers, smiled mockingly. They revealed everything that could be revealed and promised joys—which are no joys at all.

  Suddenly my neighbor glanced at my book and asked, “Is that Hebrew?”

  “Yes, Hebrew,” I replied.

  “That’s not a modern book,” she observed.

  “No, it’s a religious work.”

  “Are you a rabbi?” she asked.

  “No, I’m no rabbi.”

  “I’m Jewish, too,” she said, “but I don’t know any Hebrew. My parents sent me to Sunday school but I’ve forgotten everything. Even the alphabet. Please let me take a look.”

  She took The Path of the Righteous and I noticed that her fingernails were red as blood and sharp as a bird of prey’s. It seemed to
me that The Path of the Righteous was resentful toward me for handing it over to her.

  She gazed a long time at the letters and said, “That’s an aleph.”

  “Yes, an aleph.”

  “And what’s this?”

  “A mem.”

  “Right, a mem. I’m going to Israel and I must learn Hebrew. They tell me it’s one of the hardest languages.”

  “It’s not easy, but it can be learned.”

  “A European language is easy for me,” she said. “I was in Spain for four weeks and I quickly picked up the language. But Hebrew is a completely strange element to me.”

  “No matter how strange an element may be, it can become familiar,” I said. At the same time I knew that my words carried a sly reference, as if to say, “Now I’m a stranger, but tomorrow I may sleep with you.”

  She glanced at me curiously, as if she perceived my intention. Her rouged lips said, “Yes, I understand.”

  We got to talking. I had already forgotten about The Path of the Righteous and The Voice of Elijah. I had just fled from worldliness, but I was again a worldly person. The airplane taxied down the runway, and through the window I saw the lights rushing backwards. In a few seconds we would know whether we would live or be crushed. We were in the power of a machine and all its nuts, bolts, and gears. Thank God, the plane took off safely. I could already see the rooftops through the fog. But no one here thanked the Almighty. The passengers kept conversing as usual.

  The girl told me that her fiancé had obtained a year’s contract to teach electronics at Jerusalem University. She praised him as an absolute genius. He had been a professor even before he got his doctorate. He had been offered a high-paying job in a noted firm, and Washington had tried to get him. She dropped names that I forgot the moment I heard them, but the gist of it all was that, at thirty-one, Bill was one of the biggest physicists in America and a true candidate for the Nobel Prize. He had already made a number of important discoveries. He had been offered a full professorship at Harvard or Princeton—I forget which—but he had allowed himself to be persuaded by an Israeli diplomat to take a post in Jerusalem for a third of the pay that he could have gotten in the States. He was taking an Ulpan course in Hebrew, since he had to know at least a minimum of the language. He wasn’t a Zionist, she added, far from it. But somehow he had been intrigued by the idea of teaching and doing research in Israel. There was a younger and more serious element there; there was idealism. He came from a rich family. His father was a famous doctor, one of the most prominent in America; he had a huge yacht, a luxury apartment on Fifth Avenue, and homes in Old Greenwich and Palm Beach. Yes, her fiancé was a Jew, but until a short time ago in name only. He hadn’t had the slightest interest in Jewishness. He had never even been to Sunday school. But somehow the concept of a Jewish homeland had stirred his imagination. The Israeli diplomat was a very interesting person, himself a scientist and a young man who would surely achieve a brilliant career in the future.