Foreskin's Lament: A Theological Appraisal

By NAOMI SEIDMAN

FORESKIN'S LAMENT
A Memoir
By Shalom Auslander
320 pages. Riverhead Books. $24.95

God hates Shalom Auslander, and this new book isn’t going to help Auslander’s case. Auslander is in trouble, and yes, it’s personal. It isn’t just all the sins he confesses to here, in great and dangerous detail. The most dangerous thing is that he’s happy. He loves his wife, really loves her, and he loves his little boy, Paix (don’t ask). It’s clear to anyone familiar with the Jewish terror of happiness that such a scenario can only represent a clear target, a big old bull’s eye for one of God’s notoriously nasty schemes—a little child sacrifice? A particularly nasty strain of meningitis? How about another Holocaust?

Not that God isn’t also out to get lots of other people. For all his concern with the particular people he cares about, Auslander has the example of other God-targets before his eyes at all times. And he isn’t the only one who’s terrified of God (and for good reason):

The people of Monsey were terrified of God, and they taught me to be terrified of Him, too—they taught me about... a man named Moses, who escaped from Egypt and who roamed through the desert for forty years in search of a Promised Land, and whom God killed just before he reached it—face-plant on the one-yard line—because Moses had sinned, once, forty years earlier. His crime? Hitting a rock. And so, in early autumn, when the leaves choked, turned colors, and fell to their deaths, the people of Monsey gathered together in their synagogues across the town and wondered, aloud and in unison, how God was going to kill them:—Who will live and who will die, they prayed,—who at his predestined time and who before his time, who by water and by fire, who by sword, who by beast, who by famine, who by thirst, who by storm, who by plague, who by strangulation, and who by stoning.

Then lunch, and a fitful nap.

God, and His heated defenders the Orthodox Jews, might argue that this is an unfair characterization of Him. In a chat room discussion of Auslander I recently browsed, the critique goes like this: Sure, Orthodoxy has its problems, but if Shalom Auslander weren’t such a twisted freak, from such a dysfunctional family, he might not have taken it so literally, so personally. It could hardly be a coincidence that the Big Bully in the Sky has His own little petty tyrant installed in Auslander’s Monsey home, in the form of his violent, angry father, who in one scene attacks Auslander’s older brother with a Shabbes table. As for Moses, it wasn’t just hitting the rock, for God’s sake. Read the midrash to understand the true mystical-ethical-allegorical-symbolic-spiritual-literary meaning of that rock. From Auslander, you’d never know that anyone had ever tried to spruce God up a bit, make Him a little more acceptable (loving, ethical, or at least less capricious) to reasonable grownups.

But I’d counsel against a psychological reading of this memoir. What makes this memoir so unlike all those others out there is that it is fundamentally not about his “dysfunctional family,” or “alcoholic father,” or “oppressive upbringing.” Nor is a memoir of “losing one’s faith.” This is a memoir of Auslander’s continuing relationship with God, past piety and Orthodoxy and on through blasphemy and sin (rather than their paler modern counterparts, skepticism and self-affirmation). Auslander presents us with a Jewish God angrier and more powerful than any we’ve seen since the Middle Ages, or, to put it otherwise, since kindergarten. What gives this God His awful and crazy power is not so much how violent He is as just the fact that He exists, an existence more real and unsettling than I suspect is regularly experienced even in the strictest of Orthodox yeshivas or synagogues. What we have in Foreskin’s Lament is not the abstract death of an abstract God but rather a long fuck you to a God who has already said fuck you to the memoirist.

For readers who didn’t grow up in someplace like Monsey, New York, the book presents not only an old-and-unimproved God, but also a host of other unfamiliar exotica, rendered in precise and beautifully unspiritual prose. The best passages of the book juxtapose Auslander’s particular manias (his enthusiasm for the New York Rangers, for instance) with the larger mania known as Jewish law. We learn not only that the work forbidden on the Sabbath includes driving to sports stadiums or watching matches on television but also that this work can be parsed into precisely thirty-nine categories: “sitting on the lawn was prohibited because the grass could dye your clothes—dyeing, category 15. Some held that it was also a violation of plowing, category 2, and should the grass be pulled out of the ground by the heel of your shoe, reaping, category 3.”

Auslander is equally generous in providing detail about what are called (perhaps misleadingly) “positive” commandments, for instance blessing fruits, vegetables, pastries, breads, “everything else” (for which the blessing is “shehakol”), and in the non-food categories: rainbows, thunder and lightning, excretion (“asher yatsar”). In an early chapter that revolves around Auslander’s thrilling come-from-behind victory in his third grade Blessing Bee, Auslander makes it clear that blessings can get very, very complicated: “Of course,” Auslander calmly and authoritatively reminds us, “for a kosher candy bar with fruits, nuts, or other fillings, the blessing depends upon why you ate it. If you ate it specifically because you like the filling, you must recite the appropriate blessing for that filling. However, if you are eating the candy as much for the chocolate as you are for the filling, you must first recite a shehakol on the chocolate, followed by the appropriate blessing on the filling.” He adds, “Theologically speaking, candy wasn’t worth it.”

For all its rich and generous detail, its often hilarious wit and gratifyingly off-kilter perspective, Foreskin’s Lament is a baggy monster of a memoir, with episodes sometimes joined together as randomly as life itself. I hope I am not giving anything away to say that in the inevitable comedown that follows his Blessing Bee triumph, Auslander hits puberty as if he were a truck and puberty was a wall, eats the most disgusting treif food America has had the wisdom to slap between burger buns or shape into sticks, fears God’s and his father’s wrath and more than once becomes the target for this wrath, falls in lust with various Jewesses and shikses, hangs out in the hedonistic hells of suburban shopping malls and Manhattan pizza stores, desecrates the Sabbath and mixes meat and milk, masturbates as much as any of us, is shipped off to one of those Israeli yeshivas that specializes in “at risk” young Jews (at risk, that is, of thinking for themselves), buys himself a “black hat” and so becomes religious again, moves back to Manhattan and succumbs to a “sin binge” that includes a visit to a prostitute and another to a MacDonald’s and ends with him leaving the fold more or less for good, “good” being the operative word here. And then, somehow, somewhere, Auslander finds a beautiful and understanding woman with a perfectly matching set of Jewish family dysfunctions, marries this woman and tries to make it work (see above: masturbation, prostitution, rage, God), achieves a measure of peace and near-sanity with the help of some outrageously expensive but apparently effective psychiatric intervention, has a son and a final break with his family. When, as Auslander writes, a doula at his son’s birth remarks that it is sad that he is not on speaking terms with his family, he answers “not as sad as if I were speaking to them.” That this memoir, which begins with such reservoirs of rage and craziness, ends with a measure of self-acceptance and a love-story is a kind of miracle, a modern-day fairy tale, though one touched with the continuing trauma of Auslander’s break with his family and—even more—his rage at the God that won’t go away. Even at the height of what should have been Auslander’s fairy-tale moment of paternal joy, this God intrudes to demand that piece of the young prince’s penis that is allegedly and biblically His due, on pain of who knows what divinely decreed human catastrophe. Ultimately, maybe, this isn’t really a memoir about human beings. It’s about God. Beware.