When I was a small child, I made up my mind to die in order to see God face-to-face. In the suburban synagogue in Boston, where I and my family worshipped every Saturday, I had been told always to bow my head during the benediction at the close of the service. Standing on the high altar, the rabbi, a very learned, grave man from Minneapolis, would raise his arms so that the black sleeves of his clerical surplice billowed out, and, rising to my feet, I understood that it was the moment for me to cast my eyes scrupulously at the floor. It was important, everyone said, that I keep my head down, because God passed through the synagogue at that moment, and, as I knew from the Bible, no one could look directly at God and survive. Even Moses, the greatest of our leaders, had to content himself with a mere glimpse of the back side of the deity; a frontal encounter would have meant certain death.
For weeks I wrestled with my strong impulse to violate this powerful taboo, a taboo linked in my mind with the prohibition against pronouncing God’s name. When we encountered the divine Tetragrammaton—Yud-Hey-Vov-Hey—we could not speak the sound these four Hebrew letters together made, but had instead to content ourselves with saying a completely different Hebrew word, Adonai or “Lord.” In the privacy of my bedroom I experimented, like some Renaissance magician, with various ways of pronouncing the mystical name, but I could never persuade myself that I had gotten it right. Evidently, the secret sound was lost forever. But a miraculous vision of God was still possible, even if it was hedged about with a terrible penalty. All I had to do was to raise my head and to look up. Death would surely follow, but not before I had the vision.
I did not share my inner struggle with the forbiddingly sober rabbi and still less with my parents, for I knew they would try to dissuade me from making the supreme sacrifice. I hinted at what I was contemplating doing to my older brother, but he merely looked amused and mildly contemptuous, as older brothers are accustomed to do, and I concluded that he did not understand how recklessly brave I was, how determined I was to possess the miraculous sight at any cost.
And so, one Saturday morning, I did it, perhaps the only truly courageous thing I have ever done in my life. The rabbi held out his arms and began to intone the blessing. I bowed my head and then, accepting my fate, forced myself slowly to raise up my eyes. And what did I see? I and a few other deluded children must have been the only people in the synagogue who were actually looking down. Everyone else was looking around, catching the eyes of neighbors and friends, signalling greetings, smiling or stretching or yawning. There was no mysterious presence, no transcendent sight, no miracle. It is decades later, and I still have not quite rid myself of the outraged realization: I had been lied to.
But that disillusionment, though it has proved ineradicable, is not the whole story. When I confronted my mother and angrily demanded to know why she had deceived me, she quietly explained that it was important to act “as though” God were passing through the room. This formulation was not a mere evasion; it is a deep and vital part of the Jewish tradition. The Haggadah read at the Passover Seder, the meal that commemorates the exodus from Egypt, enjoins a continual renewal of the ancient experience: “In each and every generation, it is a man’s duty to regard himself as though he went forth out of Egypt, as it is said, ‘And thou shalt tell thy son in that day, saying, This is done because of that which the Lord did unto me when I came forth out of Egypt.’”
I realize now that I have spent much of my adult life brooding about the meaning and the aesthetic uses of “as if,” but at the time I found this explanation unsatisfactory. It seemed to contrast unfavorably with the robust belief in spectacular miracles professed in schoolyard conversations by my Catholic classmates and particularly by a cute girl named Rosemary Fiumara who told me that Jesus had personally dislodged a fishbone perilously stuck in the throat of her aunt, a nun. The well-meaning attempt to give equal time to Judaism and Christianity, in the days before religion was run out of the schools, made matters worse by insisting on the dismaying conjunction (in school assemblies, for example) of Christmas, with its moving blend of potlatch and piety, and Hanukkah. To be sure, Hanukkah, with its candles, top-spinning, potato pancakes, and gift-giving, was hugely appealing, but, even as a child (perhaps especially as a child), I noticed a certain embarrassing disjunction between the miracle of the birth of God to a virgin and the miracle of consecrated oil in the Temple lamp burning longer than had been expected. More recently, I have come to understand the Hanukkah story in relation to the right-wing Jewish settlers on the West Bank or even to the militant triumph of fanatics like the Taleban in Afghanistan—after all, part of the Hasmonean revolt was the killing of the Hellenizers—but that understanding, had it been available to me as a child, would scarcely have increased Hanukkah’s wonder in relation to Christmas.
The Hebrew school to which I went three days a week for six long years did not make matters better, in large part, I suppose, because I and my fellow ingrates, resentful that we weren’t doing something less improving after school, did not give it much of a chance. It is, in fact, almost incredible to me how little I allowed myself to learn in those endless hours, all the more incredible given the fact that my teacher for three of the six years, Karl Cohen, was an extraordinarily learned man. All I can remember of his appearance at this point is his close-cropped gray hair, teeth stained brown with pipe tobacco, and rumpled gray suit. All I have retained from his teaching is an ability to stumble uncomprehendingly through the liturgical formulas of the Hebrew prayer book.
Every now and again, despairing of his efforts to teach us Hebrew conjugations, Karl Cohen would tell us something of what had happened to him in Germany in the late Thirties: he was a refugee who had managed to escape, but only after harrowing internments in Dachau and Buchenwald. Everyone else in his family had been murdered, and he himself at times seemed quite unhinged. When he became enraged with us—and our stupid antics, mainly centered on throwing cinnamon “imperials” across the room at one another, would have tried the philosophical patience of Spinoza—he would suddenly snap, scream at us to stand at attention, and take out a little black notebook in which he would mark something down, as if in anticipation of dreadful punishments to come. He told us once that he had been made to stand so for hours at a time, with the threat of death if he moved, and I suppose that the strain of the identification with the aggressor accounted for the fact that he would sigh after a few moments and tell us to sit down again.
Sometimes, then, he would stop the lesson and tell us to put down our pencils. “No notes, no notes,” he would warn, as if we would otherwise be feverishly recording every word. And he would launch into a long, ecstatic account of something he had discovered in the Widener Library at Harvard about Isaac Abravanel—Leone Ebreo, as the Italians called him—who had managed in the early sixteenth century to fuse certain kabbalistic notions with Florentine neo-Platonism. “The world is not ready for this knowledge,” he would repeatedly tell us who were certainly not ready for it and who didn’t understand a word of it. (I would now in fact very much like to know what he had discovered, but I believe that the secret has gone with Karl Cohen to the grave—and, of course, there were no notes.)
When he would finally descend from his Pisgah sight of a Judeo-Platonic mystic marriage, we would return to the Hebrew conjugations. Karl Cohen was something of an educational reformer, at least for those days. He would hand out to us the semester’s final examination—a long multiple-choice test—a week ahead of time, since he was more interested that we learn than that we be judged. And in response to this generosity we devised a way to keep any possibility of learning to a bare minimum: we secretly divided the test among ourselves and each did only our section. Then we made a master list of the correct answers (B, D, A, A, C, etc.), memorized this list, and promptly and perversely forgot the actual things we were meant to learn. We were clever enough always to introduce some mistakes in our tests, so that there would be an illusion of authenticity to the results. (And some of us, in any case, couldn’t remember the whole, long, nonsensical answer-key, so much more difficult to commit to memory than Hebrew grammar would have been.)
But, always frantically eager to excel in school, I once forgot (or could not bring myself) to introduce the requisite mistakes. Not only did I receive then a perfect score (though by dint of my cleverness, I knew next to nothing), but I was given the award as the best student in the Hebrew School class. The prize was this: I had to go up to the high altar in the synagogue and receive from the rabbi’s own hands a scroll, wrapped in a blue ribbon, along with a book inscribed to me. The book was called They Are All Jews, and I still have it somewhere. It had pictures and brief accounts of famous Jews, from Moses to Maimonides to Marx, Freud, Einstein, and other worthies. Many of the modern figures, like Marx, had at best a dubious relation to Judaism, but the whole array was meant to make us feel proud.
For my part, however, I was concentrating on an anxiety intensified by the irony of this gift in my particular case, that is, by the fact that I was called to the altar only by virtue of a shameful trick, one very small step away from cheating. I thought briefly, I remember, of climbing up there and confessing everything, in a kind of Dostoevskian fervor of self-cleansing. But I knew that I would do nothing of the kind. It occurred to me then that God would send a thunderbolt down and strike me dead. Thus once again the thought arose in me of a miracle, a miracle that would bear witness to the truth of my religion over my dead body. But I went up and received my scroll and my book, and there was no lightning or thunder, and I descended intact. Or so I told myself at the time, though it now occurs to me that I may not have.
Stephen Greenblatt, who teaches English at Harvard, is the author of Marvelous Possessions, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, and other books about literature and history. He is also the editor of the Norton edition of Shakespeare.
