The Sabbathday River

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  Judith said they were. She took off her apron. She was wearing a dress so modest and plain it seemed nearly prim, and her strand of white pearls. She looked beautiful. And serene. A matriarch in waiting. “Judith,” Naomi said, “you look …”

  “Thank you,” said Judith. “Here.” It was a plate of matzos, thin and irregularly shaped, covered by a linen napkin. “David brought them from the city.”

  “You have to go to Hester Street,” he said amiably. “There’s one little guy left. Every year, all the assimilated Jews troop down there to try to pay off their guilt.”

  “Is that what you are?” Naomi said, smiling. She took the plate in one hand and Polly’s forearm in the other.

  “No. I’ve unassimilated myself. But even so, I’m still guilty.”

  Joel, passing with his empty bottle of wine, laid an emphatic hand on David’s shoulder. “David,” he said, “please chill.”

  But he was grinning. They both were. She looked from one face to the other, bewildered. Then they went into the dining room, and as they stepped before her Naomi saw for the first time why she had imagined his hair to be so discordantly rough and smooth. He was actually wearing a black yarmulke.

  She put the plate of matzos on the table and busied herself settling Polly in her high chair beside her. On Polly’s other side, a little girl, Rachel’s daughter, sat in her own seat, looking on with interest. The same black hair and rounded nose, but here the eyes were eerily green. She was not a pretty girl, but Naomi saw that she would be—like her mother and aunt—a striking woman. “Can I play with her?” Hannah said. “I like babies.”

  “Of course,” said Naomi. “You must be Hannah.”

  “I’m Hannah. How old is she?”

  About a year and a half, Naomi told her. The little girl’s eyes widened. “Really?”

  “Sweetie,” Rachel said from across the table. The word was light, but there was within its tone an unmistakable note of warning. Involuntarily, Naomi looked at her.

  “You have another child?” she heard herself say. That she had said what she was thinking, without censoring herself, surprised her. “I mean, I think Judith once mentioned a nephew.”

  “Yes,” Rachel said. “Simon is just a bit older than Polly. He’s home in Providence with my husband.”

  “Oh,” said Naomi lamely.

  “It was better not to bring him. Judith might have mentioned that he has a degenerative illness.”

  “She did. Yes.” She didn’t know what to say. “He must miss you,” she finally uttered, loathing herself, but to her surprise, Rachel shook her head.

  “No. He doesn’t.” Then she smiled at Naomi. It was not a happy smile, by any means. “But I miss him.”

  “Miss who?” Judith said. She was back in the dining room, handing each of them a slender book.

  “Simon.”

  Naomi watched Judith’s eyes.

  “Yes. Shall we start?”

  Abruptly Rachel laughed. “Judith, can you believe we’re doing this? Mom would die if she could see us.”

  “Mom did die,” said Judith. She took her seat. “David?”

  “Thank you,” said David.

  They opened their books, Naomi from the front at first. Then, when she saw her mistake, from the back.

  She was surprised how quickly it returned. The washing of hands, the lifting and replacement of undrunk wine, the dipping of parsley in salt water. When the afikomen was hidden she had a sudden, giddy memory of tearing apart Linda Grossberg’s Central Park West apartment looking for the matzo wrapped in a white embroidered cloth, and how she had found it, nestled improbably between the two volumes of the OED, and how Dr. Grossberg had ransomed it for a dollar. She remembered the hit of horseradish against the honey apple of the haroseth. She remembered the red drops of wine on the good white china: the river of blood, the frogs, the lice, the wild beasts, the pestilence, the boils, the hail, the locusts, the darkness, the slaying of the firstborn. Through it all, Polly sat quietly, sometimes shredding the stem of parsley Naomi had given her, but often staring at David, whose voice boomed with ceremony, his Hebrew guttural and hypnotic, his intercut English purposeful and choppy.

  “Why is this night different from all other nights?” Hannah chirped, rehearsed and on cue.

  Because it reminded us of other nights. Not only long ago, in Egypt, but black and torturous nights not nearly so distant. Because this was the night we told ourselves our own story, to make sure we never forgot it.

  To Naomi, this was unexpectedly seductive. She thought of how, when Alex Haley had returned to Africa to find out about his slave ancestor, he’d had to sit through hours of tribal narrative before the small story of his own relative could be recounted. The story of the individual was inextricable from the story of the tribe. Our story, Naomi nodded, placing the dry, vaguely musty matzot on her tongue. The Exodus from Egypt, the sweep of Diaspora, the expulsion from Spain, the waves of emigration across the water, and the terrible sea that had closed over anyone left behind.

  Then David recounted a part of the story she hadn’t heard before. How the Jewish slaves toiled for hundreds of years in Egypt, and suffered terribly in bondage, and cried constantly to their God for deliverance, but were unheard, or at least unheeded. Why should He ignore them, His own chosen people? Then the angel Gabriel took a newborn child who had been maimed by the Egyptian overseers and carried it aloft to heaven, forcing God to look. God could not bear the sight of a mutilated Jewish child. Its wounds served to remind Him of His covenant with Abraham.

  “He couldn’t bear the sight of a mutilated Jewish child?” Naomi said aloud.

  “That’s what the Talmud says.” David nodded.

  “He’s not very consistent,” said Rachel. “There’ve been one or two since then.”

  “Well,” said David, “God may have had other lessons to teach us at later times in our history.”

  “So cruel,” Naomi said. “This God of ours.”

  “He never said He wasn’t,” Joel interjected. “He laid it all out for Moses, right off the bat. I am a jealous God. But He still chose us.”

  They went on. The glasses of wine. The bitter sandwich of matzo and maror. A tone-deaf rendition of “Dayenu,” in which even Polly participated, beating her soggy parsley against the tray of her high chair. And, before the meal, one final blessing: “I believe with all my heart in the coming of the Messiah, and although he will be late, I will wait each and every day for his arrival.”

  Judith stood. She cleared away the used plates and collected the Haggadahs.

  “It’s funny the way it acknowledges that he’s late,” Rachel said to David. “I mean, it sort of has a castigating tone, doesn’t it?”

  “You think God feels castigated?” David smiled, taking a very unceremonial drink of wine.

  “No, but maybe angry.”

  “Oh, He’s been cursed before. We cursed Him from the moment He chose us as His people. And that’s all right, because being angry with God won’t hurt Him a bit.”

  Joel nodded his concurrence. “Besides, there are things God regards as far worse than our anger.”

  “What’s worse?” Rachel said. She was cutting a matzo ball in Hannah’s soup bowl.

  “Worse than being cursed?” Joel said. “Being abandoned. By us.” He smiled. Steam from the soup clouded his glasses. “We’re all mad to assimilate in this country.”

  “Oh, I don’t know that that’s true,” Rachel said. “Maybe the Our Crowd crowd, but not shtetl Jews.”

  David helped himself to the salt as it was passed around the table. “Is that so?” He smiled a little. “And what was Communism if not a mass abdication from Judaism? It was an old faith exchanged for a new faith. A faith of non-faith.”

  “Hey,” Naomi said, “it seemed like a good idea at the time. Besides, I never felt compelled to believe in a Creator. To me, nature and chance between them are sufficiently vast to explain just about everything.”

  “Nature and chance m
ade you?” David said, frowning.

  “Absolutely. Or, more precisely, they made the things that made me. The Big Bang, the double helix, the survival of the fittest, supernovas, the ascent of man … the world according to PBS. It works for me.” She sighed. “Come on. You guys are scientists.”

  “Yes, Naomi.” Joel’s voice had an edge. “But I just don’t see that it’s enough to discount even the possibiliy of God. I mean, even for a questioning person like yourself?”

  “Oh no,” Naomi said, declining this appeal to her intellectual vanity. She tipped her soup bowl to fill her spoon. “I can do a little better than that. Understand, I’m not a philosopher.”

  “Understood,” said Joel.

  She paused, drank, and considered. “God, by definition, is omnipotent. Yes?”

  “Yes,” said David. “Limitless, omnipotent.”

  “God is perfectly good.”

  “Ah,” David said noncommittally. “Go on.”

  “An omnipotent being can prevent evil. But there is evil all the time. So which is He not? Omnipotent or good? Or maybe He’s both those things, but He doesn’t actually exist.”

  “He never said He was good,” Joel said passionately. “He wants us to be good.”

  “The suffering of children? Couldn’t He prevent that, at least?” Naomi asked, raising her eyebrow. “I mean, the rest of us maybe. But not children.”

  David shook his head. “Maybe that’s not the right question, Naomi. Maybe you are too inclined—well, understandably inclined—to look at the problem of human suffering in only one way: Why can’t it be prevented? Maybe the right question is: What is the purpose of suffering?”

  “I refuse to consider that,” said Naomi. “No purpose can possibly justify suffering.”

  “No?” He smiled. “Doesn’t suffering help us to appreciate good by showing us the contrast of the two?”

  “Perhaps. But that’s not enough.”

  “Aren’t there virtues which are only possible against a backdrop of evil and suffering?”

  Naomi frowned. “Such as?”

  “Courage. You can’t have courage without peril. You can’t have forgiveness without the thing that has to be forgiven. These things require at least the risk of suffering to even exist.”

  She considered. “That’s true. But I’d rather forgo some of these noble attributes and get rid of war and cruelty and disease at the same time.”

  “Wait a minute.” Joel leaned forward. “God’s ways are mysterious. We only see a fraction of the whole, you know. And on the basis of that, who are we to judge whether evil is necessary?”

  “No, that doesn’t wash.” Naomi shook her head. “That’s like saying, ‘I reject your theory in favor of another theory which I can’t think of.’” She reached down to retrieve Polly’s fork. “Here, sweetie-pod.” Then she broke off a piece of her matzo and gave it to the little girl.

  “Racka,” said Polly.

  “Cracker. Yes.”

  “She really talks,” Hannah said wonderingly.

  “Yes. She has lots of words.”

  “It’s amazing.”

  Naomi looked at her. She was staring at Polly.

  “So you don’t believe at all.” David was intent.

  “Afraid not,” said Naomi. “Though I respect your belief.”

  “No, you don’t,” Joel observed, his voice tight. Naomi looked at Judith, who sat tensely, her eyes on her plate; then back at Joel, who waited for an answer.

  “Well, I’d like to. Maybe that’s the same thing.”

  “For the record,” David broke in, “I don’t think so. Wanting to believe isn’t the same as believing. You can’t get yourself to believe just through logic, or some kind of an act of will. Like learning a language or losing a few pounds.”

  “No, I suppose not.” She smiled. “Otherwise everybody would be doing it.”

  “Not that people don’t try,” David said, sitting back in his chair. “I once had this born-again-Christian friend. She took me to a movie about the Rapture, at her church in Somerville. She was really after my soul.” He grinned. “I thought it was my body, a little more in line with what I was after, but I flattered myself. So in the movie, the main character is this agnostic woman who wakes up one morning and half the people in the world are gone. Her folks, all her born-again friends, just gone. She waits days to hear from her husband, who’s in the army overseas, and finally a letter comes. It’s written the day before the Rapture, and it says, ‘Darling, wonderful news. Today I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior!’”

  “Good timing,” Rachel observed.

  “So then the armies of the Antichrist come and try to get this poor woman to accept Satan’s mark. She has to accept it or be martyred as a Christian. And she wants passionately to believe, but she can’t decide.”

  “And how did it end?” Judith said.

  David shrugged, smiling. “It was one of those really nasty endings. The woman’s being dragged to the guillotine, and the Antichrist folks are saying, ‘Take the mark! Take the mark!’ And then the movie just freezes, so you never know if she held firm and got to go to heaven or not.” He sighed. “I remember when the lights came up, everybody in the whole place swung around in their seat and looked at me. I was such a challenge to them. Though whether because I was an atheist or a Jew, I’m not sure.” He turned to Naomi, sober again. “You know what interests me, though? Despite your lack of belief, you do seem to consider yourself a Jew.”

  “One hundred percent,” Naomi agreed. “Wanna make something of it?

  “But what does that mean to you?” said David. “Being a Jew without God?”

  “Survival. My DNA is the beneficiary of countless generations of survival. I am absolutely humble before this fact. And grateful, please don’t mistake that.”

  “Well!” He sounded triumphant. “Survival is not to be sneezed at. Survival is the theme of the Seder, after all.”

  “Oppression and survival, yes. Don’t forget the oppression, though. I know I can’t.”

  “I can’t either,” said David. “You know what’s the subtext of every Seder since 1945? It’s Fuck you. We’re still here.”

  Naomi grinned. David glanced at Hannah. “Sorry,” he said to Rachel.

  “That’s okay. She’s heard worse, haven’t you, babe?”

  “Yup,” Hannah said.

  David drank from his wineglass. “Well anyway, the Haggadah says, ‘In every generation an enemy has risen to destroy us.’ Pretty steep odds. There must be a reason for our having survived.”

  “Really?” Naomi said archly. “Why must there? Nature and chance saw to our survival, not to mention sheer will. That doesn’t mean it has no meaning, or that we shouldn’t attach great significance to it. But there was no reason. Because there is no God. It’s a story we made for ourselves, to tell us how to live, and to preserve our tribe, and to sustain our self-image when we are persecuted and dispersed. And it worked beautifully. Whatever they did to us, we survived. And it has an intrinsic beauty, which I also respect. This”—she gestured at Judith’s table, her good silver and crystal glasses—“is beautiful.”

  “Thank you,” Judith said cautiously.

  David leaned back as Judith removed his soup plate, but he never took his eyes off Naomi’s face. “Interesting that you chose the pronouns ‘we’ and ‘us.’”

  “But that’s just my point. Nothing brings out my Judaism like anti-Semitism.” Naomi was cutting some of her chicken for Polly. There was a tzimmes of sweet potatoes, too, and noodle kugel laced with currants and apricots. Also Judith’s transcendent (as it turned out) gefilte fish.

  “Well, let me ask you something, Naomi. If an external force like anti-Semitism is required to keep Jews Jewish, is Judaism worth preserving at all?”

  Naomi put down her fork. “I don’t know. It’s a good question.”

  “I think there are more pertinent questions,” Rachel said. “I mean it’s all very interesting to talk about faith a
s if this were just between the Jews and God, but there have been a few other players in our history. Like, I know you can see this coming, David, but if there is a God, where was He during the Holocaust?”

  “He was there.” David chewed his chicken. “He heard. It ended, didn’t it?”

  “It started,” said Naomi darkly.

  “He was there, but He doesn’t control everything that we do. He made us and He gave us the choices. Man chooses between good and evil. Often, unfortunately, he chooses evil, and when he does, God suffers with the victims.”

  “Not good enough,” said Rachel. “I mean, Christians, at least, have a reasonable response to this problem, but we don’t. A Christian can say she knows she can handle sorrow, because she believes God won’t give her something she can’t handle, so she can draw strength from his belief in her. But what tools do we have to confront sorrow with? If we’re punished, we must deserve it in some way. He even leaves it to us to figure out what we did wrong. Plus we don’t get to burden God with our private prayers. Christians can talk about their personal relationship with Christ. He’s their personal savior. But we’re not encouraged to be intimate with the Master of the Universe. He’s got bigger stuff on His mind, so He can’t pay much attention to our little lives. We have to say the ancient words when we pray, and we’re not allowed to improvise. Plus there’s no promise of an afterlife, where we can look forward to seeing the people we love and mourn. All we have is this, and if our history is any indication, this is nobody’s idea of a picnic. Sometimes I wish I could believe in the Christian God. He’s so much friendlier.”

  “Oh, He is?” Joel said ironically. “I haven’t noticed that the world’s been a nicer place for the last two millennia. Besides, I’ve never understood how Christians can actually bring themselves to trust the God Jesus tells them to trust. Isn’t this the same God we’re talking about, after all? So if He abandoned the people of His original covenant, as they claim, what makes them think He’ll honor His so-called new covenant with them?”

  “Maybe they feel we blew it and they can do a better job,” Rachel said.