The Same Old Thing
Religion. Do we
know what it is? A belief in
God: is that it? For many people
this is so. Yet can God really be
the cause of faith? It does not
seem possible, for something so strong and long lasting, and yet so nebulous:
for ultimately he is our creation, an idea that exists at our behest. Can something so individual and so
abstract be so powerful? Did God
really build the castle that defends the faithful against all attacks; and is he
still the handyman, repairing the walls and the creaking gates… Such a lot of work for him to do; and
never suffering from arthritis or a bad back…
It is not facts and arguments, those favourite friends of
the philosophers and theologians, that account for God’s vitality, for most
people are unaware of them. They
are the weakest part of any religion, though the process of reasoning almost
certainly solidifies the faith for those who engage in it; a kind of mental
ritual for the priestly caste. For
reason is easily adapted to the needs of any belief; moulded to whatever the
occasion demands: a factual statement to commit someone to an act of worship
can easily become a symbol to repulse a too insistent truth and threatening
doubt; the calling cards of the geologist and historian; those unwelcome guests to the deity's house.
Why love this God and not that one? Why not worship in the football stadium
rather than the synagogue…
Is belief, perhaps, just a strong and passionate attachment
to an idea, which a particular kind of God objectifies? Can it all be reduced to some words on
a page and a few sentences inside the head we are educated into believing by
the culture into which we are born?
Do we learn Christianity like mathematics and English Literature; St
Paul passed down like Euclid’s geometry?
The source of the teacher’s script some seer in the forgotten past, a
strong and inventive character who indoctrinated a band of disciples; his
vigorous personality overcoming their doubts and common sense. Was Jesus Christ the original Ludwig
Wittgenstein? The Gospels a precursor to
Philosophical Investigations?
Joseph Roth suggests otherwise. He
has an answer for us to consider.
‘When will it be Sunday?’
thought Mendel. Once he had lived
from one Saturday to the next; now he lived from one Sunday to the next. On Sunday visitors came – Miriam, Vega,
the grandchild. They brought
letters from Sam, or at least news of a general nature. They knew everything. They read the newspapers. They were running the business
together, now. It was still going
well; they were all industrious…
Mendel Singer is in New York, having left the Pale of
Settlement to remove his daughter Miriam from between the legs of the Cossacks
she loves so much; and to live with his son Shemariah, who emigrated to the
United States years ago.
His life has been hard. A poor religious teacher, Mendel has always struggled for
money; and made his own life more difficult by keeping to his religious
principles. And like many Jews the
family has had to make large sacrifices to keep their sons out of the Russian
army; a death sentence for many at that time. Because they were poor they could only save one son –
Shemariah. Luckily his brother
Jonas was keen to join the army: he wants to be a simple peasant and soldier;
for he desires horses, strong drink and lots of women; the Russian girls rich
fields for his ripe seed. Mendel
thus loses both sons: Jonas is no longer a Jew and Shemariah lives in a
different country. And Mendel’s
wife no longer loves him, and he has lost his desire for her a long time ago. Mendel is poor, and his life is hard,
but in Zuchnow he keeps his faith, teaching the Bible every workday and
observing the Sabbath once a week.
He instructed twelve
six-year-old scholars in the reading and memorizing of the Bible. Each of the twelve brought him twenty
kopecks every Friday… On Friday
[Deborah, Mendel’s wife] scrubbed the floor until it was yellow as
saffron… Outside, before the door,
she aired the furniture, the brown wooden bed, the sacks of straw, the scrubbed
deal table, two long, narrow benches…
As soon as the first twilight misted the windows, Deborah lighted the
candles in the plated candlesticks, threw her hands over her face, and prayed…
Her husband came home, in
silky black; the floor shone up at him, yellow as melted sunshine; his
countenance shimmered whiter than usual, and blacker than on weekdays gleamed
his beard. He sat down, sang a
little song, and then parents and children sipped their soup, smiled at the
plates, and spoke no word. Warmth
rose in the room. It exuded from
the pots, from the platters, and from their bodies. The cheap candles in the plated candlesticks could not stand
it, they began to bend. Tallow
dropped upon the red-and-blue checked tablecloth, and became encrusted
immediately. The window was thrown
open; the candles manfully took hold of themselves and burned peacefully to the
end. The children laid
themselves upon the straw sacks, near the stove, but the parents sat awhile and
gazed with troubled solemnity into the last blue flames which rose up out of
the sockets of the candlesticks and wavered back, a fountain-play of fire. The tallow smouldered, thin blue
threads of smoke drew upward towards the ceiling from the embers of wick. ‘Ah!’ sighed the woman. ‘Do not sigh,’ warned Mendel
Singer. They were silent. ‘Let us sleep, Deborah,’ he
commanded. And they began to
murmur the nightly prayer.
At the end of each week the
Sabbath dawned thus, with silence, candles, and song. Twenty-four hours later the Sabbath sank into night; the
grey procession of weekdays began, a weary cycle.
In New York, under the burden of family tragedy, and the
guilt of leaving their disabled son in Russia, Mendel loses his faith. Would he have lost it in Zuchnow? If he had followed the same routines,
his life sustained by the age-old colours and smells, the voices of his pupils,
if he had remained laced up in the corset of his home village, would he have
given up on God? We cannot know,
of course, for sure. But the
ending is suggestive: after a miraculous incident he regains his faith and
returns to Europe; the source of all his beliefs. The peculiar quality of America, its centrifugal forces
pulling people’s lives apart, separating faith from mundane activity, have helped
weaken the walls that secured his ancestor’s religion; which he imbibed with
the soup and the songs and the candles of his parents and the daily regime –
religion never left the house and workplace; it was ingrained into its
routines. At Zuchnow the rituals
of work and prayer would have protected his faith. They would have continued to
buttress his Judaism, supporting it through even the hardest, the most
despairing, of times. Of course he
may still have lost it. But such
apostasy would have been much more difficult – the rest of the community would
make it almost impossibly so. The
rituals would have been too strong, absorbed into the body, into Mendel’s very
being, they would have overcome the weaknesses of his mind; like hoops around a
barrel they would have held his doubts in place. In America he has nothing to do, and there are other
distractions: the constant change of unexpected things, the newspapers, the
business successes of his son and the increasing fissiparousness of his own
family (they left Russia so that Miriam would not go with a Cossack; in America
they accept she will marry one – an American Catholic). All the bonds are weakening. Each day religion takes up a few
minutes less; becomes smaller and smaller, until it disappears like the last
hairs on an old man’s head.
Is it ritual that keeps the faith alive; embedding religion
deep inside one’s habits, imprinting them onto our mind and very body. Think of the scene above and how the
Sabbath is intimately linked with the Friday washing, the warm soup, the songs,
the silence and the day of rest; that time of joyous melancholy. Religion is a strong-bodied wine that
is absorbed through the skin like water into fertile earth. The words are mere decoration: the rote
learning itself a ritual, turning the word into flesh and blood.
Religion is part of life and cannot be separated from
it. It is not ideas or words or
even a sermon, but our arms and legs and our stomachs. No wonder it can so easily resist the
charms of Bertrand Russell and Charles Darwin; and accommodate itself to other
faiths – all religions are themselves a mixture of different ideas and cultural
practices, which they have absorbed to create their own synthesis. Only when the process is reversed, when
the intellectuals seek to return the religion to the purity of its original
conception, and the body is asked to submit to doctrine, does the religion
become metaphysical – fundamentalism is the attempt to reduce our abundant life
to a few simple myths.
There are many religions even within Mendel Singer’s own
family. In a marvellous scene
Miriam gives herself to the sun; while at the same time listening to the songs
of the nearby barracks; imagining all the soldiers are singing to her! Her beliefs are her own beauty and her
finely tuned senses. Even Mendel
himself is touched by the pagan gods: on the first week of Ab all the men go
out into the fields to greet the new moon. Deborah believes in a more mystical Jewish faith, of magic
men and prophecy; not the mundane acceptance of one’s fate and a simple trust
in God’s work, that is her husband’s.
So many religions held in place by the daily routines, anchored by that
weary cycle; of weeks that do not change, reinforcing all that has gone before. The past has created the present and
determines the future. It is therefore quite natural for Deborah, hearing the
news that both Jonas and Shemariah have been called to the army, to run to the
cemetery and to pray to the dead…
The force that controls their lives, the ritual that shapes their
experiences, and holds them in place, was created long ago. The barrel is an ancient one; and was
made to last for millennia.
Break that cycle and faith is no longer supported by the
daily round; so that the hoops rust, loosening the staves until they eventually shift and
fall. Not protected by the body’s
habits belief becomes a separate part of life; an activity apart; so that it
gradually fades, becoming vestigial.
Like cheap tallow candles it bends and bends… is almost out…
[Then t]he window was thrown
open; the candles manfully took hold of themselves and burned peacefully to the
end.
Shemariah moves to America, and acquires a new faith. It is the beginning of the end of his
old one. Now called Sam, he no
longer thinks of following his father and becoming a simple teacher of the
Bible. Business will be his
religion. America is a new god
with its own august words and rituals: of speed and efficiency; of making money
and reading the daily newspapers.
Mendel can see its problems, and refuses to be acculturated; he will not
be an apostate to his faith.
Nevertheless, the daily impact of this new world slowly weakens and
destroys those old rituals, and his Judaism becomes a rickety house easily
blown over by a heavy storm…
It would take a miracle for his faith to be
resurrected. Can it happen here in
New York City? Other novels of
Roth offers the possibility of hope: the miraculous interventions of supermen
who change the game entirely: Brandeis,
Lenz,
Zwonimir… Everywhere there is a messiah who can
save you. In the 19th century they were called geniuses, in the 20th century they are
spies, entrepreneurs, revolutionaries and officials of various kinds. In Job it is a doctor that cures Menuchim, allowing him to
find and master his outstanding talent – for music. It brings fame and prosperity, and gives him the opportunity
to find his father. A miracle! Mendel
believes. The old religion returns.
He looked at the
photograph. Although the picture
was worn, the paper dirty, and the portrait seemed about to dissolve into a
hundred thousand tiny molecules, it looked up from the programme with
vitality. He wanted to return it
immediately, but he held it and stared.
Under the black hair the forehead was broad and white as a smooth, sunny
stone. The eyes were large and
clear. They looked directly at
Mendel Singer. He could not free
himself from them. They made him
happy and light-hearted, Mendel believed.
He saw the light of their intelligence. They were old, and at the same time young. They knew everything; the whole world
reflected itself in them. It seemed
to Mendel Singer, looking at these eyes, that he himself was younger; he was a
youth who knew nothing. He must
learn everything from these eyes.
Years ago, when he had begun
the study of the Bible, these had been the eyes of the prophets. They knew all, they betrayed nothing;
they were full of light.
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