The Finkler Question

by Howard Jacobson

  Treslove accepted that under Libor’s tutelage he had grown obsessive about the PLO scarf. It frightened him. Whatever its innocent origins as a headdress ideally suited to a cruel climate – Abraham and Moses, presumably, would have worn something like – it had taken on a huge symbolic significance, no matter that the PLO was now, as Libor explained to him, the least of Isrrrae’s worries. To wear it was to make an aggressive statement, regardless of the rights and wrongs of the situation. Fine, if you were a Palestinian, Libor always said; a Palestinian had a right under all the laws of grievance to his aggression. But on an Englishman it only ever denoted that greed for someone else’s cause, wedded to a nostalgia for simplicities that never were, that was bound to make a refugee from the horrors of leftism shudder. So Treslove, who was a refugee only from Hampstead, shuddered along with him.

  But this ageing biker who couldn’t wait to muffle himself in a PLO scarf was not just one more English ghoul feeding on the corpses of the oppressed, he was a Jew, and what is more he was a Jew who seemed to have made his home in a Jewish house of prayer! Explain that, Libor. But Libor couldn’t. ‘We have become a sick people,’ was all he said.

  In the end Treslove had no choice but to ask Hephzibah, whom he had wanted to spare.

  ‘Oh, I make a point of never looking there,’ she told him when he at last mentioned what he’d been watching for the last however many weeks.

  She made the place sound like Sodom, which one cast an eye over at one’s peril.

  ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘What else goes on there?’

  ‘Oh, I doubt anything goes on. But they do parade their humanity a bit.’

  ‘Well, I’m all for humanity,’ Treslove was quick to make clear.

  ‘I know you are, darling. But the humanity they parade is largely on behalf of whoever isn’t us. By us, I mean . . .’

  Treslove waved away her awkwardness. ‘I know who you mean. But couldn’t they do that without going so far as to wear that scarf? Can’t you want better of your own without actually cheering on your enemy? By your, I mean . . .’

  She kissed the back of his head. Meaning, he had a lot to learn.

  So he sat at home and tried to learn it. He felt that Hephzibah preferred it that way, not having him under her feet in the museum. And he preferred it that way too, guarding the apartment while she was out, being a proud Jewish husband, breathing in the smell of her, waiting for her to come home, sighing a bit with the excess weight she carried, her silver rings jingling like a belly dancer’s on her fingers.

  He liked the hopeful way she would call his name the moment she let herself in. ‘Julian! Hello!’ It made him feel wanted. When the others used to call his name it was in the hope that he was out.

  It was a relief to hear her. It meant he could call it a day with his education. He wished he had done a module or two in Jewish Studies at university. Perhaps one on the Talmud, and one on the Kabbalah. And maybe another on why a Jew would wear a PLO scarf. Starting from scratch was not easy. Libor had suggested he learn Hebrew and was even able to recommend a teacher, a remarkable person almost ten years older than he was and with whom he sometimes enjoyed a leisurely lemon tea at Reuben’s restaurant on Baker Street.

  ‘By leisurely I mean it takes him three hours to drink it through a straw,’ Libor explained. ‘He taught me the little Hebrew I know in Prague before the Nazis turned up. You’ll have to go to him, and you might not be able to understand much of what he’s telling you, his accent is still pretty thick, he came from Ostrava originally – he certainly won’t be able to hear you, by the way, so there’s no point in your asking him anything – and you’ll have to put up with the odd neck spasm – his, I mean, not yours – and he’ll cough over you a lot, and maybe even shed a tear or two, remembering his wife and children, but he speaks a beautiful classical pre-Israeli Hebrew.’

  But Treslove considered Hebrew, even if he could find someone to teach him who was still alive, to be beyond him. It was more history he wanted. In the history of ideas sense. And the knack of thinking Jewishly. For this Hephzibah recommended Moses Maimonides’ The Guide for the Perplexed. She hadn’t read it herself, but she knew it to be a highly regarded text of the twelfth century, and since Treslove owned himself to be perplexed and in need of a guide, she didn’t see how he could do any better.

  ‘You’re sure you don’t just want me out of your hair?’ he checked, once he’d seen the contents page and the size of the print. It looked like one of those books which you started as a child and finished in an old persons’ home lying in a bed next to Libor’s Hebrew teacher.

  ‘Look, as far as I’m concerned you’re perfect as you are,’ she told him. ‘I love you perplexed. This is what you keep saying you want.’

  ‘You sure you love me perplexed?’

  ‘I adore you perplexed.’

  ‘What about uncircumcised?’

  It was a subject to which he frequently returned.

  ‘How often must I tell you,’ Hephzibah told him. ‘All that’s immaterial to me.’

  ‘All that?’

  ‘Immaterial.’

  ‘Well, it isn’t exactly immaterial to me, Hep.’

  He offered to talk to someone. It was never too late. She wouldn’t hear of it. ‘It would be barbaric,’ she said.

  ‘And if we have a son?’

  ‘We aren’t planning to have a son.’

  ‘But if we do?’

  ‘That would be different.’

  ‘Ah, so what would be good for him, would not be good for me. Already, there are competing criteria of maleness in this house.’

  ‘What’s maleness got to do with it?’

  ‘That’s my question.’

  ‘Well, go and get yourself an answer from some higher authority. Read Moses Maimonides.’

  He dreaded getting so far with Maimonides and then suddenly hitting that blank wall of incomprehension that awaited him at about the same point, even at about the same page, in every work of philosophy he had ever tried to read. It was so lovely, bathing in the lucidities of a thinker’s preliminary thoughts, and then so disheartening when the light faded, the water turned brackish, and he found himself drowning in mangrove and sudd. But this didn’t happen with Maimonides. With Maimonides he was drowning by the end of the first sentence.

  ‘Some have been of opinion,’ Maimonides began, ‘that by the Hebrew zelem, the shape and figure of a thing is to be understood, and this explanation led men to believe in the corporeality [of the Divine Being]: for they thought that the words “Let us make man in our zelem” (Gen. i. 26), implied that God had the form of a human being, i.e., that He had figure and shape, and that, consequently, He was corporeal.’

  Of themselves, Treslove believed he might have made some headway with these refined distinctions relating to the appearance, or not, of the divine, but first he had to ascertain the exact status of the word zelem and at that point he was among the mystics and the dreamers. OK, literally the word meant what Maimonides said it meant, an image or a likeness, but it had a strange disquieting sound to Treslove’s ear, almost like a magic incantation, and when he tried to track down those with whose ‘opinion’ Maimonides was arguing – for one needed to know the extent of one’s perplexity in order to be guided out of it – he found himself in a world where commentary was piled upon commentary, striations of reference and disagreement as old as the universe itself – until there was no knowing who was arguing with whom, or why. If man was indeed made in the zelem of God, then God must have been incomprehensible to Himself.

  This religion is too old for me, Treslove thought. He felt like a child lost in a dark forest of decrepit lucubrations.

  Hephzibah noticed that a mood of despondency had fallen on him. She put it down at first to his not having enough to do. ‘Another few months and we’ll be up and running,’ she said.

  What exactly Treslove’s responsibilities were going to be when the museum was up and running had never properly been discussed. Sometimes Tres
love imagined he would be a sort of Anglo-Jewish culture maître d’, welcoming people to the museum, showing them the way to the exhibits, explaining what they were looking at – the Anglo as well as the Jewish – exhibiting in himself that spirit of free unschismatic enquiry and cross-cultural interchange the museum existed to foster. And it was possible that Hephzibah had not progressed beyond that idea herself.

  The question of what precisely Treslove was for – whether in the professional, the religious or indeed the marital sense – remained to be addressed.

  ‘Everything all right between you?’ Libor had asked his great-great-niece early on.

  ‘Perfect,’ she had told him. ‘I believe he loves me.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘The same. He needs a bit of looking after, but then so do I.’

  ‘I’m very fond of you both,’ he said. ‘I want you to be happy.’

  ‘We should be half as happy as you and Aunt Malkie were,’ Hephzibah said.

  Libor patted her hand and then fell vacant.

  Hephzibah was worried about him. But as Treslove noticed the day she helped him with the Four Questions, worrying over men came naturally to her. It was another of those Finkler traits that he admired. Finkler women knew that men were fragile. Just Finkler men or all men? He wasn’t sure. But he was the beneficiary of her concern either way. Seeing him in low spirits, she would gather him into her arms, graze him accidentally with her rings – it hurt, but what the hell! – and hide him away in her shawls. The symbolism wasn’t lost on him. When his actual mother had found him downcast she would peck him on the cheek and give him an orange. It wasn’t love he’d lacked, it was envelopment. Wrapped around in Hephzibah he knew true peace. It was better there – inside her in the non-erotic sense, though it wasn’t without its eroticism – than anywhere he’d ever been before.

  ‘You’re not having second thoughts?’ she asked, seeing him slumped in an armchair looking heavenwards.

  ‘About us, absolutely not.’

  ‘About what then?’

  ‘Yours is a tough religion,’ he said.

  ‘Tough? It’s you that’s always saying how full of love we are.’

  ‘Intellectually tough. You keep going off into metaphysics.’

  ‘I do?’

  ‘Not you specifically, your faith. It does my head in, as one of my sons says, just don’t ask me which.’

  ‘That’s because you insist on understanding it. You should try just living it.’

  ‘But I don’t know what parts to live.’

  ‘Maimonides not helping?’

  He pulled a weary face. ‘I guess no one ever promised that the process of being unperplexed would be easy.’

  But secretly he wondered if the task was beyond him. He felt sorry for Hephzibah. Had he passed himself off as something he could never be? He was in danger of reverting to type and picturing only one end to this – Hephzibah dying in his arms while he told her how much he adored her. Verdi and Puccini played in his head, even as he ploughed on with Moses Maimonides. The Guide for the Perplexed became a romantic opera for him, ending the way all the operas he loved ended, with Treslove onstage alone, sobbing. Only this time as a Jew.

  That’s if he ever made it as a Jew.

  He stumbled blindly from one chapter to another. ‘Of the divine Names composed of Four’, ‘Twelve and Forty-two Letters’, ‘Seven Methods by which the Philosophers sought to Prove the Eternity of the Universe’, ‘Examination of a passage from Pirke di-Rabbi Eliezer in reference to Creation’.

  And then he got on to circumcision and found himself galvanised into thought.

  ‘As regards circumcision,’ Maimonides had written, ‘I think that one of its objects is to limit sexual intercourse.’

  He read it again.

  ‘As regards circumcision, I think that one of its objects is to limit sexual intercourse.’

  And then again.

  But we don’t have to follow him through every reading.

  As a matter of course he read every sentence of Maimonides a minimum of three times, but that was to seek clarity. Here was no obfuscation in need of conscientious penetration. Circumcision, Moses Maimonides argued, ‘counteracts excesssive lust’, ‘weakens the power of sexual excitement’ and ‘sometimes lessens the natural enjoyment’.

  Such a claim merited reading and rereading simply for itself. And indeed for himself, if he was ever to get to the bottom of who Finklers were and what they really wanted.

  Among the many thoughts that crowded into Treslove’s mind was this one: did it mean he’d been having a better time than Finkler – Sam Finkler himself – all along? At school Finkler had boasted of his circumcision. ‘With one of these beauties you can go for ever,’ he had said. And Treslove had countered with what he’d read, and with what made perfect sense to him, that Finkler had lost the most feeling part of himself. A verdict in which Moses Maimonides unequivocally concurred. Not only had Finkler lost the most feeling part of himself, it had been taken from him precisely in order that he should not feel what Treslove felt.

  A great sadness, on behalf of Tyler, suddenly welled up in him. He had enjoyed her more than Finkler had. No question of it. He had the wherewithal to enjoy her more with.

  But did it follow from that that she had enjoyed him more than she had enjoyed Finkler? He had not thought so at the time. ‘No woman will want to touch yours,’ Finkler had warned him at school, and Tyler’s apparent reluctance to look at him seemed to bear that out. But was it a reluctance or was it a kind of holy dread? Did she fear to look upon what gave her so much pleasure? Had he been a godhead to her?

  For what gave him more pleasure must surely have given her more pleasure too. A man made reluctant by his circumcision would logically communicate that reluctance to his partner. The ‘weakened power of sexual excitement’ had to work both ways. What counteracted ‘excessive lust’ in the one had to counteract ‘excessive lust’ in the other, else there was no point in it. Why maim the man to limit sexual intercourse if the woman went on demanding it as fervently as ever?

  Indeed, Maimonides said as much. ‘It is hard for a woman, with whom an uncircumcised had sexual intercourse, to separate from him.’ Women had not found it hard to separate from Treslove, but that could have been attributable to other causes. And initially he had always done reasonably well – ‘If you think I’m going to let you fuck me on our first date you’ve got another think coming,’ they had said to him, letting him fuck them on their first date – which suggested it was what they later discovered about him as a person that was the problem, not the prepuce.

  He felt possessed of a thrilling power he had never known was his. He was the uncircumcised. From whom women found it hard to separate.

  Physically hard to separate, did Maimonides mean, in that the uncircumcised somehow knotted inside the woman like a dog? Or emotionally, in that the uncircumcised’s untiring lustfulness besotted her?

  Both, he decided.

  He was the uncircumcised, and he had spoken. Both.

  In retrospect, he fell in love with Tyler all over again, knowing now that she must have loved him more than she could ever admit. And had been afraid to look upon that which made her wanton.

  Poor Tyler. Besotted with him. Or at least besotted with his dick.

  And poor him for missing out on that exquisite knowledge at the time.

  If only he’d known.

  If only he’d known, what then? He wasn’t sure. Just if only he’d known.

  But it wasn’t all regret. He was also excited by this discovery of his own erotic power. Lucky Hephzibah at least.

  Unless his untiring lustfulness both wearied and disgusted her. And as a matter of ethno-religious principle she would have preferred him snipped.

  3

  He rang Finkler.

  ‘You ever read Moses Maimonides?’ he asked.

  ‘Is that the purpose of your call?’

  ‘That and to enquire how you are.’

&nbs
p; ‘I’ve been better, thank you.’

  ‘And Moses Maimonides?’

  ‘I guess he’s been better too. But have I read him? Of course. I count him as among my inspirations.’

  ‘I didn’t think you found Jewish thought inspiring.’

  ‘Then you think wrong. He teaches how to make abstruse thought available to the intelligent layman. He is all along saying more than he appears to say. We plough the same furrow, he and I.’

  Oh yeah, Treslove thought – Guide for the Perplexed and John Duns Scotus and Self-Esteem: a Manual for the Menstruating.

  But what he said was, ‘So what do you reckon to what he says about circumcision?’

  Finkler laughed. ‘Why don’t you just come right out with it, Julian? Hephzibah wants you to have it done – yes? Well, I wouldn’t stand in her way. But between ourselves – ha! – I think you might be a wee bit old. As I recall, Maimonides warns against it past the eighth day. So that’s you out. Just.’

  ‘No, Hephzibah does not want me to have it done. She loves me as I am. Why would she not? Maimonides says circumcision limits sexual intercourse. I impose no limits myself.’

  ‘I am pleased to hear it. But is this about you or Moses Maimonides?’

  ‘It’s not about me. I simply wonder what you, as a philosopher who ploughs the same furrow, think about Maimonides’ theory.’

  ‘That circumcision is to put a brake on sex? Well, it certainly exists to make us afraid, and making us afraid of sex is part of it.’

  ‘You always told me Jews enjoyed sex inordinately.’

  ‘Did I? That must have been a long time ago. But if you’re asking me whether circumcision as a means of inhibiting the sexual impulse is specifically Jewish, I would say not. Anthropologically speaking, it isn’t primarily about sex anyway, except in so far as all initiation ceremonies are about sex. It’s about cutting the apron strings. What is Jewish is interpreting the circumcision rite in the way Maimonides does. It’s he – the medieval Jewish philosopher – who would wish us to be more restrained and imagines circumcision as the instrument. But I have to tell you it has never worked on me.’