One of modern man’s most inane passions is reading newspapers in order to keep up with the latest news. The news is always bad and it poisons your life, but modern man can’t live without this poison. He must know about all the murders, all the rapes. He must know about all the insanities and false theories. The newspaper isn’t enough for him. He seeks additional news on the radio or on television. Magazines are published that sum up all the news of the week, and the people reread what crime this or that evildoer has committed and what every idiot has said. The craze of politics has even seized our so-called orthodoxy. And as for the passion for money! If you read the orthodox press, you hear a single message trumpeting from every article and story: “Give money!” They need endless amounts of money to build yeshivas, to maintain—as they put it—Jewishness. It’s an absolute lie. The big yeshivas, the bright classrooms, the good food, the examinations—this is all mimicry. There are already orthodox colleges in America or universities that teach the youth a little Torah and a lot of goyishkeit. The students are supposedly being trained to adjust to both worldliness and God. The fact is that once you are adjusted to the world, you can no longer be adjusted to God. Those children that prattle away in modern Hebrew, with its Sephardic pronunciation, will sooner or later read all the trashy books that are translated here. Hebrew must remain a holy tongue, not a language used in nightclubs.
I had told that wench Priscilla that the Jewish God was an “idol” to me. Maybe I meant it at the time. Faith is not an easy thing to acquire. Long after I had become a Jew with a beard and earlocks, I still lacked faith. But faith gradually grew within me. The deeds must come first. Long before the child knows that it has a stomach, it wants to eat. Long before you reach total faith, you must act in a Jewish way. Jewishness leads to faith. I know now that there is a God. I believe in His Providence. Whenever I’m troubled or a child of mine gets sick, I pray to the Almighty.
I won’t boast to you that my faith is absolute. Maybe there is no such thing as total faith. But I believe more today than I ever have before. Darwin and Karl Marx didn’t reveal the secret of the world. Of all the theories about creation, the one expounded in Genesis is the most intelligent. All this talk about primordial mists or the Big Bang is a wild absurdity. If someone found a watch on an island and said it had been made by itself or that it developed through evolution, he would be considered a lunatic. But according to modern science, the universe evolved all on its own. Is the universe less complicated than a watch?
I know what you want to ask me—if I am still interested in sex. Believe me, a pure, decent woman can provide a man more physical satisfaction than all the refined whores in the world. When a man sleeps with a modern woman, he actually gets into bed with all her lovers. That’s why there are so many homosexuals today, because modern man is sleeping spiritually with countless other men. He constantly wants to excel in sex because he knows that his partner is comparing him to the others. This is also the cause of impotence, from which so many suffer. They’ve transformed sex into a marketplace with competitors. Today’s man must convince himself that he is the greatest lover and that Casanova was a schoolboy in comparison. He tries to convince the female, too, but she knows better.
The female is in the same position. She knows that her husband has, and has had, many other women, and she wants to compete with them, to be smarter than they are, prettier than they are. Modern man has injected competition into areas where it does not belong. All modern life is a series of contests to determine who is tallest, biggest, strongest; able to perform better than the others. Today’s female yearns to be the most beautiful creature on earth.
Among those Jews with whom I live, there are no big people or little people. One man spends more time with the Torah; another, reciting Psalms. One has more time to study, another must work for a living. No one compares, no one measures himself against the others, and the main thing is: there is no chasing after budgets. They’ve freed themselves of the worst human passion—the need to be rich.
I’d be a liar if I told you that it’s all sweetness and light among us. There are bad people here, too. The Evil Spirit hasn’t been liquidated. Even as I sit there and study the Gemara, I think idle thoughts more befitting a wastrel. A moment doesn’t pass without temptations. Satan is constantly on the attack. He never gets tired. But I have linked myself to Jewishness with bonds that are hard to tear. These bonds are my beard, my earlocks, my children, and now—my age as well.
At times, the Evil One says to me: “What will happen, Joseph Shapiro, if you should die and there is no hereafter? You will be a pile of dirt, blind, mute, a stone, a blob of mud.”
I hear him out, and I reply, “My mortality would not prove that God is dead and that the universe is a physical or chemical accident. I see a conscious plan and purpose in all being, in man and in animals as well as in inanimate objects. God’s mercy is often hidden, but His boundless wisdom is seen by everyone, even if they call Him nature, substance, absolute, or by any other name. I believe in God, His Providence, and in man’s free will. I have accepted the Torah and its commentaries because I am sure that there is no better choice. This faith keeps growing in me all the time.”
Author’s Note
This novel was first serialized in the Jewish Daily Forward between January and March 1973. It was published in book form in Israel by the Peretz Verlag a year or so later. Like other writers, I nurture the illusion that there exists at least one reader who follows everything I have published, even things I have said in interviews. This devoted reader might have read my conversation with Richard Burgin in the magazine section of The New York Times, upon my return from Stockholm in January 1979. As I remember, I then expressed ideas which may seem to be the opposite of what the protagonist of The Penitent is saying. In the novel, Joseph Shapiro continuously berates men and women who have forsaken God, the Torah, and the Shulhan Arukh, but in that interview I voiced a severe protest against creation and the Creator. I recall saying that although I believed in God and admired His divine wisdom, I could not see or glorify His mercy. I ended the interview by saying that, if I were able to picket the Almighty, I would carry a sign with the slogan UNFAIR TO LIFE! I also mentioned my unpublished essay, “Rebellion and Prayer, or The True Protestor.”
This imagined reader of mine could well ask me, “Do you repudiate now what you said then? Have you finally made peace with the cruelty of life, and the violence of man’s history?” My candid answer is that Joseph Shapiro may have done so, but I haven’t. I’m still as bewildered and shocked by the misery and brutality of life as I was as a six-year-old child, when my mother read to me the tales of war in the Book of Joshua, and the bloodcurdling stories of the destruction of Jerusalem. I still say to myself that there isn’t and there cannot be a justification either for the pain of the famished wolf or that of the wounded sheep. As long as we dwell in the body, vulnerable to all possible variations of suffering, no real cure can be found for the calamity of existence. To me, a belief in God and a protest against the laws of life are not contradictory. There is a great element of protest in all religion. Those who dedicate their lives to serving God have often dared to question His justice, and to rebel against His seeming neutrality in man’s struggle between good and evil. I feel therefore that there is no basic difference between rebellion and prayer.
While I was brought up among extremists who thought and felt like that angry man, Joseph Shapiro, I cannot agree with him that there is a final escape from the human dilemma, a permanent rescue for all time. The powers that assail us are often cleverer than every one of our possible defenses; it is a battle which lasts from the cradle to the grave. All our devices are temporary, and valid only for one specific attack, not for the entire moral war. In this sense I feel that resistance and humility, faith and doubt, despair and hope can dwell in our spirit simultaneously. Actually, a total solution would void the greatest gift that God has bestowed upon mankind—free choice.
This book, like ma
ny of my other works, was translated into English by my nephew Joseph Singer, the son of my late brother and master, I. J. Singer, and edited by my good friend Robert Giroux with the editorial assistance of Lynn Warshow.
I often discussed with my brother the lack of dignity and the degradation of modern man, his precarious family life, his greed for luxury and gadgets, his disdain of the old, his obeisance before the young, his blind faith in psychiatry, his ever-growing tolerance of crime. The agonies and the disenchantment of Joseph Shapiro may to a degree stir a self-evaluation in both believers and skeptics. The remedies that he recommends may not heal everybody’s wounds, but the nature of the sickness will, I hope, be recognized.
I.B.S.
THE BEGINNING
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PENGUIN CLASSICS
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First published in the United States of America by Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1983
Published in Penguin Classics 2012
Copyright © Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1983
All rights reserved
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Designed by Jack Harrison
ISBN: 978-0-241-35047-8
The Penitent Page 10