City of God

by E. L. Doctorow

  In the lobby people wave, nod, as they always have. “Cool threads, Father,” says a security guard. One of the aides asks if I have a heavy date.

  Not to worry, right, Lord? They think we’re still talking.

  I climb the stairs to the men’s floor, the third. Sound of my new loafers, bought too large, clopping on the stair treads. That and my loud breathing.

  You walk into a ward and are met by the generic blank stares of the pre-dead. People dying retreat into themselves. Everything of interest in life seems foolish and pointless to them now. Everything vital—the sun in the window, the sympathetic visitor, the nurses who suppose a continuing daily life—is a matter of deep, painkilling indifference.

  Old McIlvaine, dying, was not of the pre-dead. Nor was he among the pious few who came out of themselves to pray with the father, grip his hand.

  Not this old man.

  Bed after bed. Some new faces, some old faces, some rasping away with noses pointed in the air, their mouths open. Lord, don’t have taken him, let him still be here.

  His anticlericalism was gentle. If I wanted to pray, he told me, go right ahead, if I wanted to read a psalm, he would listen with a smile. Made these concessions, as if in some instinctive understanding of the trouble I was in. “That’s very pretty, Father.. . . If you say so, Father.. . . I wouldn’t want to disillusion you, Father.”

  A newspaperman, a city reporter all his working life, moving on every time a paper closed under him. World-Telegram, Journal-American, Herald-Tribune, Daily Mirror, God knows what others as the papers hyphenated themselves out of existence. He attributed the closings to himself: “I am become death, the shatterer of newsrooms. Waiting that hour that ripens to their doom.”

  He is not where I last saw him, do they move people around, why would they do that?. . . and then I hear the unmistakable cough of the lunger, it seems to come up from the city sewer system, cavernous and gurgly, gravel-spewing.

  Here he is, next bed to the end, still alive, though more emaciated than ever, the nose even bonier, the eyes and cheeks like sinkholes, the incongruously full head of gray hair in a wilted pompadour on the pillow.

  “Mr. McIlvaine!”

  The skeletal hand rises in greeting, he puts a finger to his lips. “We’re doing our hymns,” he says in his juicy whisper.

  Only now do I register the nun sitting beside McIlvaine’s bed, a young sister in an attractive contemporary habit. She is strumming a guitar and in a thin, lovely soprano she sings

  Oh, shine on, shine on harvest moon, up in the sky.

  I ain’t had no lovin’ since January, February, June

  or July. . .

  I’m bewildered, so intently in my own mind, I hadn’t seen or heard her. McIlvaine’s voice has summoned up an actual pitch, he stares at the ceiling and growls along in his fashion, his eyes shining. On the last line and without missing a beat, they swing into

  The bells are ringing for me and my gal

  the parson’s waiting for me and my gal. . .

  which melds into

  There’s a somebody I’m longing to see.

  I hope that he

  turns out to be

  Someone who’ll watch over me. . .

  Clearly they’ve done this before. The nun sings with her eyes closed. She has to be Hail Marying in her mind. McIlvaine presses on. A fierce humor is carried on his sepulchral voice. The duo is now into “Sentimental Journey.”

  I look around the ward and see from the heads on the pillows an uncharacteristic alertness, something other than the generic blank stares of the pre-deads. . . here a gaze back at me, there something like a smile, and in one bed, a living cadaver, completely still and staring upward without expression, but his hand, raised barely above the bedclothes, waving in time to the music. . .

  Lord, what have you done to me?

  Now McIlvaine’s motioning for me to sing: “Follow the bouncing ball,” he says, and because this is the man I have chosen to hear my confession, I do, adding my baritone to the soprano and the growl, one golden oldie after another, and feeling the same love for You, tears welling hot in my throat, as when in the pulpit, with my congregation, I belted out, A mighty fortress is our God. . .

  —Background on the EJ synagogue: there are no social services provided, no day care, Hebrew school, and so forth, and for the time being, in what Joshua Gruen described as its first phase, the effort of instruction is directed toward adults. Congregants with children are encouraged to enroll them in Reform synagogue classes for their religious instruction, though Sarah is happy to integrate the bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah service into the Saturday morning meeting.

  The essence of the EJ approach is to take the various aspects of Jewish teaching and practice, consider their historic sources or origins and their theological rationale and, insofar as possible, hold them up to modern scholarship and begin to separate what appears to be inessential, or intellectually untenable, or simply, blindly, customary. . . from what is truly crucial and defining.

  Insofar as possible this method is incorporated into the weekly Sabbath service on Friday evening, with the Saturday morning service more or less a replay. With the coming around of the various holidays there is an additional opportunity to maintain the inquiry on a topical basis. Every service has a traditional liturgical beginning and ending (in English of course) but an extended effort of examination as its middle. This is not in the form of a sermon by the rabbi but of a rabbinically directed seminar discussion. I have found most interesting so far the several weeks given over to the documentary hypothesis of biblical authorship. There are of course reading lists provided by the rabbi, and there is a small but growing library for the use of the congregants, and so the radical EJ, is, ironically, a kind of continuing-ed yeshiva.

  Pem and Sarah agreed that his preconversion studies should be conducted by a rabbi other than her—he meets weekly with a former colleague of hers at Temple Emanuel. My friend is profoundly grateful to have been circumcised as an infant. “Jesus,” he said to me, “that would be one hell of a test of the faith.” There is another conversion ritual less assiduously held to by the Reformed—a ritual bath or immersion in a mikvah—but he wants to do that. “In front of three witnessing rabbis you duck yourself naked in the pool, and when you come up you’re reborn as a son of Abraham. As a dissolving Christian I find that comforting,” he says. “Has a nice Baptist quality.”

  “Pem, tell me truly, how much does your converting have to do with wanting to marry Sarah?”

  “How can I answer that? She has everything to do with it. And nothing. I don’t like the question.”

  “I had to ask.”

  “Trouble with the secular mind. Always looking for the percentages. Scale of values, one to ten. This is a reason I became a religious in the first place, you know. The possibility of an indivisible good, something with no parts. Sarah is my conversion, my conversion is Sarah. We will have a holy marriage, but this is all a continuation for me of my sadness that the followers of Jesus led us down the wrong path. A two-thousand-year detour. I don’t mean the beauty of the ethics, of the man. I mean the theology. I mean when they stepped him up in rank from prophet. Gave him familial ties. Does that answer your question?”

  “Pretty well.”

  “You don’t have your tape recorder today.”

  “I gave it up.”

  “You know, it may have been Isaiah who left them the opening. He should have made it clear, the messianic idea as a longing, a navigating principle, redemptive not on arrival but in never quite getting here. He didn’t make that clear, old Isaiah.. . . I’m giving you gold, Everett.”

  “I’ll remember.”

  “With Sarah, we’re getting back to it. Though I’m not sure she realizes how far back it’ll be. I’ve been doing my homework. The Jews did a lot of maundering themselves. We’ve got a long trek back through a thorny wood. But at least it’s to the one God.”

  —Last night, Friday, the Synagogue of EJ was j
ammed, must have been thirty people in the room, I arrived late, found a seat in the bay window.

  Sarah was in rabbinical black, the robe open over her street clothes. The Torah still in its simple vestment lay on the table before her. I looked for Pem and saw him sitting up in the first row.

  They were doing their seminar. Tonight the codes of conduct, the mitzvoth, of which there are some six hundred thirteen, were the subject of discussion. A well-dressed middle-aged woman whom I did not remember having seen before was saying that though Reform Judaism had once discarded many of these ritual obligations, now it appeared as if such things as wearing a yarmulke, observing the dietary laws, and the liturgy in Hebrew were to be restored. Was the rabbi aware of this?

  “Oh yes,” Sarah said. “It was big news.”

  “So who are we to pursue this radicalism?” the woman said, addressing the congregation as if it were a jury, “when even the Reform rabbis are going back to the traditional ways.” She sat down and waited for the rabbi’s reply.

  “Well, we have the same right of inquiry assumed by the generations before ours, including the Reformed, wouldn’t you say? To accept, to reject? Or to change our minds, just as they have? The glory of Judaism is its intellectual democracy, though some would try to deny this. . .”

  “The Orthodox,” a man said.

  “Not to name names,” Sarah said, smiling.

  With the increasing attendance at the EJ, there was a reiterative quality to the discussions, as Sarah was called upon by the newcomers to locate the EJ idea vis-à-vis the established branches. This was a growing problem for which the rabbi had not yet found a solution. She had printed up material outlining the synagogue’s approach, but not everyone who came in picked it up and read it or, in reading it, was ready to accept it without question. She welcomed all newcomers, but the rising numbers were making the seminar model less workable than it had been in the days of the founding families.

  The woman who had asked the question was somewhat heavily dressed, clearly used to a more formal Friday night worship, and probably a migrant from the Reformed persuasion she had just cited. People had to be satisfied that they were doing the right thing when they came up the stone steps to this unusual synagogue.

  “These codes of conduct,” Sarah said, “and the commentaries on the codes, and the rabbinical commentaries on the commentaries, all this is the group voice trying to enunciate over time what it means to be a civilized human being. . . but the key to all of this is ‘over time.’ So, here’s my question: Has time stopped?”

  Sarah held her hands out as if expecting an answer. She was really good. She was patient and smart and beautiful in a nonsexy rabbinical way, and she was in control.

  “Today it is not just rabbis who are literate,” she said. “That’s point one. Point two, this is no longer the Bronze Age. I don’t know about you, but I can’t take seriously the sacred obligation regarding the ritual sacrifice of animals to appease or honor God.. . . Another instance: I don’t think it is required of me in this century to wear a prayer shawl with fringes knotted at the corners as specified in Numbers so that I won’t forget the Ten Commandments. I think I can be trusted not only to remember them but to live by them.”

  “Perhaps the rabbi knows better,” another man piped up. “But what happens to the tradition, where do you draw the line—when there is nothing left?”

  This again was not one of the regulars. I heard some murmurs of disapproval. But I now added to the code a six hundred fourteenth mitzvah, the ritual obligation to work the rabbi over before you deigned to join her congregation. The questions had been asked before, the answers had been given before, the debate was as sacramental as reading from the Torah, not just among the three branches but within congregations and within congregants. What observant Jew did not decide personally among the sacred obligations which were to be followed and which dispensed with?

  “There is a line you draw and it’s this: God is not honored by a mechanical adherence to each and every regulation but by going to the heart of them all, the ethics, and observing those as if your life is at stake, as it may well be, I mean, your moral life, your life of consequence as a good, reflective, just, and compassionate human being. Isn’t that what Hillel meant? ‘What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah,’ he said. ‘The rest is commentary upon it.’”

  The man spoke: “I for one observe the ritual Sabbath blessings of the bread and the candles. This is not a matter of ethics. This is what we do. This is the tradition.”

  I watched a beautiful flush rise from Sarah Blumenthal’s throat to her cheeks. Her eyes shone. She folded her arms and thought about what she would say. I looked around at the expectant faces: Most of the congregation, if that is what we were, hoped our rabbi would comport herself brilliantly. I wondered if Pem understood what was going on. Every time a question was asked, he turned in his chair and glared at the person.

  “I too say the blessing when I light the candles,” Sarah said. “If a ritual takes us out of the ordinary range of feelings and directs our minds to the consideration of who we are and hope to be, it is ethically meaningful and there is no conflict. But let me ask you, what do we mean by tradition? We mean the devotions that have served historically to identify us to one another and to others. But the word tradition characterizes us, not God. Our longing, our obsessing. Our poetry, the epic of our people, but not—”

  An elderly man stood up from his chair. “Excuse me, Rabbi,” he said. “I am mostly on your side. But epic? Epic is for the Greeks!”

  This brought laughter, and a couple of people applauded. The startled old man looked around with a grin and, emboldened, held the floor. “You know, I saw this was a synagogue on my walk a few months ago. I dropped in, I liked what I found, a modern young rabbi not afraid to ask questions, intellectual discussion of this and that, and a nice little service, though some things it takes some getting used to. Like I wasn’t so happy with a co-ed minyan, but let that pass. This is a small congregation, nothing fancy, nobody putting on airs. And nobody hitting me up for the building fund. So if you new people are interested, fine, I can recommend this place.. . . But please, Rabbi,” he said turning back to Sarah, “am I wrong that there are some things we must not question? For instance that the Torah was given by the Creator, blessed be His name. That we accept the yoke of the Kingdom of Heaven. Without this, never mind no tradition—it’s no religion. Nothing.”

  I saw Pem slump in his chair and hold his hands to his head. It was that moment—he knew it well—when rationalism hits the wall.

  The little man was receiving the appreciative remarks of the people sitting near him. Was I wrong, or did I see in Sarah Blumenthal’s eyes at this moment a longing for her husband’s resurrection? I had to wonder, not without some anger at myself, if she had depended on Joshua for her theology, if she was capable of carrying his ideas forward.

  But now a heavyset man arose, an act that, given his size, was necessarily disruptive, with his chair scraping and nearly tipping over, and the people on either side of him leaning out of the way. He said to the rabbi: “Orthodox devotions that do not let in the light of modern knowledge are no more than a form of ancestor worship.” The room went silent.

  “You are saying”—turning to the little man—“that the ancients were in closer communication with the Creator than we ourselves. That they knew more, that they worked out everything that had to be worked out. And now it’s all fixed and immutable. Doesn’t that mean we are reverencing something or someone between us and God?”

  The man was magisterial, with a large head of thick gray-black hair and startlingly rude features—the eyebrows bushy, the eyes heavy-lidded and bagged, deep lines descending from the corners of the prominent nose, and gate mouth, sagging cheeks. The voice was deep. “In the Shinto religion of Japan, ancestor worship is piety. In the synagogue, I should have thought, it is the opposite.”

  His words had brought Pem to his feet, or ra
ther to turn and, with one knee on his chair, half raise himself to see who this was. When I had first come in the man had caught my attention, a broad-backed figure hunched over like Rodin’s thinker, although less reflective than impatient. He had looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him. Now, as he spoke, all at once it came to me.

  “It was not a large world, ancient Israel,” he was saying to no one in particular. “The Hebrews conceived of a cosmic God, a magnificent single God of the universe, but naturally in terms of their land and its crops and its tribal wars, and His up-and-down relationship with them. So He was localized to a great degree, the Creator, the applicable honorifics being Lord or King. All very understandable.”

  The speaker raised his head and addressed himself to the room. “But if you take the trouble to think of what we know today about the universe. . . how it is roughly fifteen billion years old, and how it suddenly inflated and has been expanding since, how space is ineluctably time, and time is ineluctably space, how gravity can bend it, how another force in space countermands gravity so that the universe doesn’t collapse into itself. . . and how the universe in its perhaps ever increasing rate of expansion accommodates not just galaxies, which contain millions of stars, but multiple clusters of galaxies that are themselves strung out in clusters of clusters. . . and with all of this a dark matter we are yet to understand. . . well, it would seem to me that the Creator who originated the universe, or what may possibly be a number of universes of which this is the only one we are capable of perceiving. . . the Creator, blessed be His name, who can make solid reality, or what we perceive as reality, out of indeterminate, unpredictable wave/particle functions. . . or perhaps make everything our senses can note or our minds deduce. . . out of what finally may be the vibration of cosmic-string frequencies. . . that all this is from Himself, or Herself or Itself, who is by definition vaster and greater than all this. . . and has given living things evolving forms and the human species a slowly evolving consciousness that is barely beginning to appreciate the magnitude of what is being revealed.. . . Well, I am forced to ask the traditionalists among us if our Creator, of blessed name, is perhaps not insufficiently praised by our usage of the honorifics Lord and King, let alone Father and Shepherd.. . .”