People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy
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During long dinners the Viceroy, like other men, will sometimes pause to swirl his barley wine, or else just stare blankly into his cup. At such times, all conversation, all breathing, stops, until Lord Joseph once more lifts up his eyes and makes some bland comment.
The princes, the courtiers, and the slaves all agree. The God Thoth visits Joseph at night, when together they discuss the secrets of the universe. A bright light leaks under the door of the Viceroy’s bedchamber, and sometimes an alert slave will hear the flutter of Thoth’s wings. And sometimes, they say, Thoth himself becomes the student, silent with wonder as Joseph teaches him secrets beyond the knowledge of Gods.
The boy Joseph curls himself up in the pit where his brothers have thrown him. Frozen in the desert night without his coat, he clutches the one treasure they didn’t take from him, the cup his mother gave him, which he keeps always in a pouch on a cord around his waist. What will it be? A lion, a scorpion, a snake? Instead, before Judah and Simeon come back to sell him as a slave, a deep sleep takes him. He does not know it, but Yah has covered him with a foul smell that will drive away the beasts, for now is the time to dream. Joseph sees himself standing before a dark sky, with his arms out and his face lifted. A crown appears on his head. The crown becomes light, pure light that spreads through his body—his forehead, his mouth, his shoulders, all the way to his fingertips, light that streams out of him, through his heart and his lungs, even his entrails, if he shits he shits light, his penis ejaculates light, the muscles and bones of his legs pure light, his toes on fire with light. Joseph tries to cry out, but light rivers from his mouth.
And then it shatters. Broken light, broken Joseph splashes through the world, becomes darkness, becomes dust, becomes bodies and rock, light encased in darkness and bodies. And letters. Letters that fall from the sky, like drops of black flame.
Joseph wakes to the hands of the slave traders dragging him up from the dirt.
Does the Beard dream? Does the fire on his face allow him even to sleep? Or does he spend so much time chatting with Yah, punishing slackers, and writing, writing, writing, that he looks at dreams, and even the future, as a hobby for children and weak minds? After all, what does the Beard care about the future? He has his book. For him, time ends with the final letter.
When his brothers bully him, when they throw mud on his coat or trip him so he falls on pebbles sharp enough to splash his coat with blood, Joseph just wants to get back at them. In Jacob’s tent one night he decides to make up a prophecy. “Listen, everybody,” he announces, “I had a dream. Last night. A really good one.” They roll their eyes or make faces but no one stops him. They don’t want to believe in him, but they do. “Here it is,” he says gleefully. “All of us were out in the fields binding sheaves. We stepped back from them, but my sheaf stood upright and all yours bowed down to it.” He smiles. “What do you think?”
Silence. No one wants to look at anyone. At last, Reuben says “Since when do you ever go out and bind sheaves?” Inside their laughter, Joseph hears the whisper of fear.
That night, a dream comes to him. The Sun, the Moon, and eleven stars all bow down to him. He wakes up more scared than elated. He should keep it to himself, he knows. He’s already got them mad, who knows what they’ll do if he pushes this one at them. He pours some water into his cup from the gourd his mother’s handmaids fill for him. Before he can drink, however, he sees in the bubbles everything that will follow—how the dream will provoke his brothers, how he will become a slave in Egypt, how he will rise to viceroy so that his family and in fact all Egypt will bow to him. It will not last, he sees. Their descendants will all become slaves, only to get free once more and stumble through the desert for forty years, forty years, before they can get back to their homeland. The vision doesn’t last. Startled, he spills the water, and the details spill from his brain. And yet he knows now that everything leads to something else, that all his actions serve some secret purpose known only to Yah. Is it all just tricks, then? Do Yah’s schemes ever come to an end?
He can stop it, he knows. All he has to do is never tell anyone the dream. Doesn’t Grandpa Isaac claim God gives all of us free will? (He remembers his father whisper “All except my brother Esau. He’s too stupid.”) If Joseph just keeps silent, the whole routine can never get started.
That afternoon, Zebulon kicks him and he blurts out “You think you’re so strong? I dreamed that the Sun and Moon and eleven stars all bowed down to me. That’s right, eleven. What do you think of that?”
Joseph is old now, facing the blank door of death. He has blessed his children and his grandchildren and their children. Soon, he knows, the embalmers will suck out his brains, squirt the “blood of Thoth” into his body, wrap him in bandages, and encase him in stone. He wonders—if his descendants really do leave Egypt, will they find him and drag him along with them?
At the foot of his bed lies a wool and linen coat painted in swirls of color. Joseph has no idea how it got there. By the size of it it looks made for a boy, or maybe a shrunken old man. Next to the bed, on a little stand, sits his cup, as bright as the coat. He has told his slave to fill it with wine, though Joseph knows he lacks the strength to lift it, let alone pour it down his throat.
When he dies, will he see Rachel and Jacob? Or has he waited so long they’ve grown impatient and wandered off somewhere where he will never find them? He is alone now. The doctors and the magicians, his family, his servants, he’s ordered them all away, and to his surprise they have listened. He wants more than anything to stay awake, so he can feel his soul, his ka, as the Egyptians call it, rattle around inside his body until it finds the way out. He tells himself that he’s read all the papyruses, the “books of the dead,” and wants to find out for himself. But he knows the real reason to stay awake. He doesn’t want any more dreams. As always, however, Yah makes His own plans.
In his dream, Joseph sees the Burning Beard one more time. With his face even more of a blaze than usual, he and his brother accost Pharaoh in the early morning, when Pharaoh goes down to wash in the Nile. Joseph watches them argue, but all he can hear is a roar. Now the brother raises his staff, he strikes the water—and the Nile turns to blood! Joseph shouts but does not wake up. All over Egypt, he sees, water has turned to blood, not just the river but the streams and the reservoirs and even the wells. For days it goes on, with the old, the young, and the weak dying of thirst. Finally the water returns.
Only—frogs return with it. The entire Nile swarms with them. Soon they cover people’s tables, their food, their bodies. And still more horrors follow. The brother strikes the dust and lice spring forth. Wild beasts roar in from the desert.
Joseph twists in agony, but Yah will not release him. He sees both brothers take fistfuls of furnace ash and throw them into the sky. A wind blows the ash over all the people of Egypt, and where it touches the skin, boils erupt. Now the Beard lifts his arms to the sky and hail kills every creature unfortunate enough to be standing outside. As if he has not done enough he spreads his hands at night and calls up an east wind to bring swarms of locusts. They eat whatever crops the hail has left standing. No, Joseph cries. I saved these people from famine. Don’t do this. He can only watch as the Beard lifts his hand and pulls down three days of darkness.
And then—and then—when the darkness lifts, the first born of every woman and animal, from Pharaoh’s wives and handmaids to the simplest farm slave who could never affect political decisions in any way, even the cows and the sheep and the chickens, the first born of every one of them falls down dead.
Just at the moment of waking up, Joseph sees that the finger of death has spared certain houses, those marked with a smear of lamb’s blood. The Hebrews. Yah and the Beard have saved the Hebrews. Joseph’s people. But aren’t the Egyptians Joseph’s people as well? And didn’t he bring the Hebrews to Egypt? If all this carnage comes because the Hebrews have lived in Egypt, is it all Joseph’s fault?
He wakes up choking. For the first time in days his e
yes find the strength to weep. He wishes he could get up and kneel by the bed, but since he cannot he prays on his back. “Please,” he whispers. “I have never asked You for anything. Not really. Now I am begging You. Make me wrong. Make this one dream false. Make all my powers a lie. Take my gift and wipe it from the world. Do anything, anything, but please, please, make me wrong.”
But he knows it will not happen. He is Joseph ben Jacob, Lord Viceroy of dreams. And he has never made a wrong prediction in his life.
How the Little Rabbi Grew
Eliot Fintushel
Rabbi Shlomo Beser was born with a caul, a shiny membrane that covered his head. It came to his maiden Aunt Dora that the child must have mystical capabilities, and she was right. At the age of two, Rabbi Shlomo recited all of the holy names of God as listed in the Book of Brilliance. He also recited several names that had never been written down. Everyone knew them to be true names, because on hearing them the cabalists, old wise ones, could not conceal their amazement. As one, they bowed their heads and mumbled, “Bar’chu uvaruch sh’moh!”: Blessed be the name.
These were names entrusted through nods and whispers by graybeards to graybeards in the secret room in the basement of the synagogue. No mortal man would have related such matters to a child. It was quite clear that Shlomo Beser had had commerce with angels.
At three Rabbi Shlomo delivered a new testament in Hebrew and Aramaic. Aunt Dora, ignorant of the holy tongues, transliterated everything syllable for syllable into English script, with a smattering of Cyrillic; to the end of her life she confused the two alphabets, one from her old country, one from her new. Dora was no maven. The old cabalists locked Rabbi Shlomo’s testament away. Not even the most learned and holy among them could look upon it without fainting or going mad for half a day, and the more a man understood of it, the worse it went for him.
All this happened in Schuylertown, New York, a town not far from Albany, in a small immigrant Jewish community. The Jews there only knew one another. They must remain pure, so the old wise ones urged them, in the service of God Almighty. They stayed strange together while the world changed. They even imagined, in their ignorance, that the city of Albany was some sort of large orphanage, as in the Hebrew, al b’nai, which means, for the children’s sake.
Rabbi Shlomo’s father and mother were ordinary people. They worked when the old wise ones told them to work and they rested when they told them to rest. He was a cabinet maker of slight means and no religious inclination. She was a woman of few words and fewer thoughts. She had thick arms and liked to sleep. Shlomo was their only child; still, they treated him like a stray dog who had followed them home and stayed on. They were not unkind to him.
The little rabbi grew faster. By his fifth birthday, Rabbi Shlomo Beser completed his formal studies under the tutelage of the wise and holy ones. Perhaps, if I may be so bold, it was like Jesus receiving the baptism of John in the stories of the Christians: Shlomo was a pious and respectful little pupil, but he knew everything before the old wise ones ever said it. Grumble as they might, they had no choice, at last, but to defer to him and call him “rabbi.”
That year he enunciated new mysteries by the light of which all present were given to understand that the great Rabbi Akiva himself had been mistaken: the Chanukah candles must be lit for eight nights in diminishing number, as against the practice, universal among Jews since the argument of Rabbi Akiva, of increasing them, one to eight. Even the old cabalists with their forked beards and black hats could find in Shlomo’s words not a cranny in which to wedge the slightest objection. Thenceforth the Jews of Schuylertown lit their Chanukah candles eight down to one.
There was a hill he liked to climb. It wasn’t a mountain. He could see mountains from it, however, the Adirondacks, capped with snow like the embroidered white cloth over the afikomen, the matzoh for hiding on Passover. He would climb this hill each Sunday afternoon if it didn’t rain or snow, beardless little rabbi in his black coat and hat, to talk with God. His father and mother let him. Aunt Dora used to walk him from home to the bottom of the hill and wait. She would read romance novels sometimes, and sometimes she would nap or nibble HiHo crackers or whistle, while Rabbi Shlomo talked with God.
When he returned from talking with God, she would bow her head and say, “How did it go, Rabbi?” or else, “What news, Shloimy? Is it anything?”
And the child would tell her stories. When he was six, Rabbi Shlomo told her how the Almighty had described to him the exact circumstances of the creation. She listened cross-legged on an old blue quilt she had spread across the couchgrass, and he sat on his knees at the edge of the quilt, half on and half off. If it was cold they would wrap themselves together in the blue quilt, all comfy, like two buns in a broiler, a big one and a little.
He told her what angels and how many and of what color hair and eyes had stood at the Blessed One’s right side and what and how many and of what coloration had stood at the Blessed One’s left when he separated the light from the dark and called it yom echad, “one day.” Her brows would arch and her mouth would open as he told her what happened to the seeds of the apple of which Adam and Eve had eaten, and the last words of Methuselah.
No fly would come near. No bird would twitter. If the sun was out, a cloud would come and shade them while the rabbi spoke and vanish as soon as he fell silent. Aunt Dora would sit and listen, and the little rabbi would sit nearby and speak until she begged him to stop.
That’s how it was. She always asked, and he always told her everything. His words flowed like lemon tea steaming from the cozy, too hot, too hot, delicious to smell, but terrible at last: she covered her face, her ears. Out of mercy, he would stop. But next time she had to ask him again. Who could help it? Others asked too, of course, but Rabbi Shlomo told them only lesser things. He reserved the deepest mysteries for Dora’s ears alone. If it is not disrespectful to say so, perhaps he loved her.
The little rabbi grew fast, and the older he got, the faster he grew. He grew in his mind and in his heart and in other subtle ways, but in stature, for a long time, he stayed small. Dora took care of Shlomo as one would take care of a child. After all, he was a child: count his years—just six.
The town was abuzz with all these strange doings. People lowered their heads before Rabbi Shlomo when they passed him on the street, all but the old cabalists themselves, who would raise their chins as an example to the people, for are not all men equal before the Almighty? But the townspeople started to importune the little rabbi in preference to the old wise ones with spiritual questions and with questions of Jewish law. Whoever managed to get past Dora received the most wonderful answers imaginable. Answers that could change a person’s life or open his heart to a happiness the like of which he had not felt for fifteen or twenty years.
This was bad enough, but when the learned and holy men, the cabalists of Schuylertown, heard about the things that happened on Dora’s quilt, they became very jealous indeed. They sent Dora a note in English: come and see us at such and such a time in the basement of the synagogue. That is where the holy ones liked to pore over their ancient texts in secret, where yellowed pages crumbled under their thumbs, reading by reading, year by year, turning to dust. For an ordinary person to be permitted to enter their little room was a remarkable thing.
They said, “Tell us everything your nephew Rabbi Shlomo says. He is learned in holy matters but simple in the ways of the world. We old wise ones want to keep watch over him in case his insights should lead him to a place his child’s heart cannot yet understand, and he should fall.”
She said, “Learned sirs, I watch over him.”
They said, “When the prodigy Reb Menachem Ben Levi was a boy of seventeen, the Evil One opened the Book of Life before him in a dream. He ran to the book to cipher out its wonders, burying his face in the sacred script, and the Evil One shut it on him, snuffing out his life. He never woke. Had he not been talking in his sleep, we would never know this. And if his mother, a common woman, who
heard it all, had had the wisdom to intercede, Reb Menachem would have lived. What further insights and glories we might have gained from Reb Menachem then!
“You are a common person like that mother of Reb Menachem’s. Will you let little Rabbi Shlomo die because of you, when we old wise ones have the power to see and save? Will you not give us access?”
“Tell me what to do.”
“Remember and write down every word. Leave the writings in a tube in a hole we will show you in the west wall of the synagogue. We old wise ones will examine these words, and, if need be, protect him. Tell him nothing of this. He is young.”
As always, Dora and Shlomo walked. Shlomo climbed his hill and spoke with God. She read and napped and nibbled and whistled, and then he came back from God, and he spoke, and she listened, until she had to say, “No more.” He kissed her on the cheek then, and she bowed her head and felt guilty, because she was hiding something.
All the way home, Dora repeated in her mind the wonders and the terrors of which the little rabbi had told her. After he kissed her goodbye and closed the door of his father’s house, Dora would turn on her heel and run like the wind. She ran home to write everything down. She mixed Cyrillic and English letters, as always, and she even invented signs or drew little pictures when she was stuck. Then she spindled the paper tightly, tightly, ran to the synagogue, went round to the west wall, looking left and looking right, and she put it in the tube in the old wise ones’ hole.
Rabbi Shlomo acted the same as always, always the same. He didn’t seem to notice a thing. If anything, he trusted her more. He sat in Dora’s lap. He played with the curls of her hair, little rabbi, while he revealed great mysteries. He closed his eyes and leaned his head against her breast, so that she could feel his words vibrate in her bosom as well as hear them with her ears.