The Woman Who Laughed at God: The Untold History of the Jewish People - Couverture rigide

THE WOMAN WHO LAUGHED AT GOD

Jonathan Kirsch, a book columnist for the Los Angeles Times and author of the bestselling and critically acclaimed King David, Moses: A Life, and The Harlot by the Side of the Road, writes and lectures widely on biblical, literary, and legal topics. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, past President of PEN Center USA West, and a former correspondent for Newsweek, he lives in Los Angeles.

ALSO BY THIS AUTHOR

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King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel

The Harlot by the Side of the Road: Forbidden Tales of the Bible

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Kirsch’s Guide to the Book Contract: For Authors, Publishers, Editors, and Agents

The Woman
Who Laughed
at God

THE UNTOLD HISTORY
OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE

Jonathan Kirsch

For Ann Benjamin Kirsch,
my beloved wife and lifelong friend,
wise counselor and woman of valor.

For Jennifer Rachel Kirsch and Adam Benjamin Kirsch,
my accomplished, beautiful, and cherished children.

And for
Judy Woo and Eui Sook (Angie) Yoon,
my dear friends and colleagues,
whose support and encouragement
were essential to the writing of this book.

Remember us in life,
and health, and strength,
O Lord who delights in life,
and inscribe us in the Book of Life . . .

Yes, God is a writer, and we are both the heroes and the readers. We know that the angels have nothing but praise. Three times a day they sing: Sublime! Perfect! Great! Excellent! But there must be some angry critics, too. They complain: Your novel, God, is too long, too cruel. Too little love. Too much sex. They advise cutting. . . . But about one quality we all agree: God’s novel has suspense.

—ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As always, I have relied on the constancy and companionship of my beloved wife, Ann Benjamin Kirsch, and our children, Jennifer Rachel Kirsch and Adam Benjamin Kirsch, in all of the work that I do, including this book.

Andrew M. Solomon was my principal research assistant, working in the libraries at Columbia University and UCLA, and his accuracy, enterprise, diligence and good cheer were indispensable in making sense of 3,000 years of Jewish history!

Leonard Braman, too, shared his research skills, and I was able to draw on research materials that were gathered for my previous books by my son, Adam, and Vera Tobin.

Clare Ferraro at Viking Penguin has long encouraged and supported my work, starting with The Harlot by the Side of the Road and continuing over the years through the publication of this book.

I have also been privileged to work with Janet Goldstein and Beena Kamlani at Viking Penguin, each of whom brought their wisdom, insight, taste, and discernment to bear upon the manuscript of this book, as well as Miriam Hurewitz, Yelena Gitlin, and Ann Mah.

Laurie Fox is not only my agent but also my muse, and it was over a cup of coffee with Laurie at a cliffside restaurant in La Jolla that The Woman Who Laughed at God was first conjured up.

Linda Chester has always been welcoming and encouraging to me and my family, both in work and in life, and I am grateful to Linda and all of her colleagues at the Linda Chester Literary Agency for making so many opportunities for me over these many years.

At the offices of Kirsch & Mitchell in Los Angeles, where the early morning hours have been devoted to this book, I have been blessed with the companionship and colleagueship of my friend and law partner, Dennis Mitchell, and our co-workers, Judy Woo and Angie Yoon, to whom this book is affectionately co-dedicated.

I will always owe a debt of gratitude to my colleagues in publishing who are also my dear friends, including Marie Coolman, Heather Smith, Robin Benway, and Liz Williams.

Among the radio and television hosts who do the important work of calling attention to books, my own among them, I am especially grateful to Connie Martinson, Larry Mantle, Joe Skelly, Warren Olney, and Michael Cart.

Among the booksellers across the country who have welcomed me and my books into their stores, I am especially grateful to Doug Dutton, Diane Leslie, Lise Friedman, and Ed Conklin at Dutton’s in Brentwood, Stan Hynds and Linda Urban at Vroman’s in Pasadena, Stan Madson and Jeanne D’Arcy at the Bodhi Tree in West Hollywood, Peggy Jackson at Borders in Montclair, Michael Graziano at Borders in Pasadena, and Katie O’Laughlin at Village Books in Pacific Palisades.

Rabbi Michael Gotlieb at Kehillat Maarav in Los Angeles has always been generous in sharing his wisdom, insight, and encouragement with me and my whole family.

Finally, and with a full heart, I acknowledge the following generous people, each of whom has supported me and my work in many different but crucial ways:

At the Los Angeles Times, Bret Israel, Elena Nelson Howe, and Susan Freudenheim in the Southern California Living section, and Steve Wasserman, Tom Curwen, Nick Owchar, Cara Mia di Massa, Susan Salter Reynolds, and Ethel Alexander in the Book Review.

At the Publishers Marketing Association, Jan Nathan and Terry Nathan.

Tony Cohan at Acrobat Books, a stalwart of the Freedom to Write program of PEN Center USA West and the publisher of my books on publishing law.

At the Jewish Journal, Robert Eshman.

My mother and stepfather, Dvora and Elmer Heller.

My beloved aunt, Lillian Heller Conrad.

My daughter-in-law, Remy Holzer, and her family, Harold, Edith, and Meg Holzer.

Among my fellow writers, I am especially and deeply grateful to K. C. Cole, Carolyn See, Diane Leslie, Jack Miles, Bernadette Shih, Eric Lax, Dolores Sloan, and April Smith.

Donald Harman Akenson, Karen Armstrong, David Noel Freedman, and Richard Elliott Friedman, each of whom is an accomplished scholar from whose work I have benefitted beyond measure.

Rabbi Allen Freehling, the Rev. Peter Gomes, Rabbi David Wolpe, Rabbi Will Kramer, Rabbi Harold Schulweis, Rabbi Isaiah Zeldin, Rector J. Edwin Bacon, Jr., and Pastor Mitch Henson.

Sheldon Kadish and Mary Ann Rosenfeld, Raye Birk and Candace Barrett Birk, Len and Pat Solomon, Scott Baker, Jacob Gabay, Inge-Lise DeWolfe, Fred Huffman, Jill Johnson Keeney, and Rae Lewis.

ONE

And Sarah Laughed

We are a people—one people.

—THEODOR HERZL, The Jewish State

·      ·      ·

There are six million Jews in America, and six million Judaisms.

—JACOB RADER MARCUS

Who is a Jew? Or, to put the question more bluntly, who is entitled to regard himself or herself as an authentic Jew, a faithful Jew, a “good” Jew?

The question was first asked several thousand years ago by the original authors of the Hebrew Bible, and it is still being asked today by both religious and secular Jews in Israel and throughout the Diaspora. After three millennia, we are no closer to a definitive answer—indeed, the only honest and accurate answer is that Judaism is not now, and never has been, a monolithic faith or a homogeneous people. In fact, the history of the Jewish people is such a rich and colorful tapestry with so many threads of belief and practice that scholars prefer to speak of it in the plural: not Judaism but “Judaisms.”

Of course, some Jews have always insisted on defining Judaism as a set of commandments literally written in stone, a moment of revealed truth that is fixed in time and place. At any point in the last three thousand years of Jewish history, we will find a few zealous Jews who have drawn a circle around a set of rituals and beliefs that they regard as essentially and authentically Jewish, and they have condemned as an apostate any Jew who dares to step outside the circle of orthodoxy as they define it. Ironically, even the most assimilated and secular Jews in the modern world seem to concede the point when they say of themselves: “I’m not very Jewish”: the unspoken premise is that Jewishness is a fixed point, and all but the most traditional Jews have strayed from authentic Judaism to one degree or another.

But there is quite another way to look at the history and destiny of the Jewish people. No single moment can be fixed as the time and place where Judaism reached its highest or purest expression. No single tradition in Judaism can be regarded as authentic and authoritative to the exclusion of all others. Starting in antiquity, and continuing without interruption to the present day, Judaism has been defined by generation upon generation of courageous men and women who felt both inspired and empowered to reimagine and reinvent what it means to be a Jew. After three thousand years of rich and daring innovation, an argument can be made that diversity rather than orthodoxy is the real core value of Judaism—and the only quality that all of the many “Judaisms” share in common.

Priestesses and Goddess Worshippers, Guerillas and Generals

That is exactly why it is so treacherous to focus on what is sometimes called classical or normative Judaism in seeking to understand what it really means to be a Jew. Hidden away behind the facade of classical Judaism is a rich and strange array of Judaisms, and for every tradition, there is a countertradition. As we shall come to see, Judaism has encompassed piety and prayerfulness but also mysticism and ecstasy, not only the ghetto but also the barricade, the gun and the plow as well as the Torah and the Talmud. Along with the more familiar figures of Jewish tradition—patriarchs and prophets, rabbis and sages, and martyrs in heartbreaking abundance—Jewish history is also populated with priestesses and goddess worshippers, astrologers and magicians, generals and guerillas, freethinkers and revolutionaries.

Many of these Judaisms have been hotly condemned when they have not been written out of Jewish history altogether. The practice of idol worship and goddess worship among the ancient Israelites was so distressing to the original authors of the Bible that they condemned it as “the abomination of desolation” (Dan. 11:31).1 The mystical and ecstatic practices of Kabbalism and Hasidism were once dismissed as “malignant growths in the body of Judaism” by one influential Jewish historian.2 Even a figure as pious and learned as the medieval Talmudist called Maimonides was condemned as an apostate in his own lifetime, and his writings were put to the flames at the behest of the more militant rabbis. The seventeenth-century philosopher Spinoza, nowadays regarded as the archetype of the modern Jew precisely because he insisted on reading the Torah with an open mind, was excommunicated by the Jewish community of Amsterdam for “abominable heresies.”3

Even the most recent and dramatic experiences in Jewish history have been the source of bitter contention. The single greatest catastrophe in Jewish history—the murder of six million Jewish men, women, and children by Germany and its collaborators during the Second World War—is regarded as a political as well as a theological mystery. Did so many Jews die because they had forgotten the ancient and authentic Jewish tradition of “the fighting Jew,” a tradition that begins with the biblical King David in the Book of Samuel? Or did they die because they had forgotten the elaborate and demanding code of religious law that begins with the biblical Moses, thus suffering the fate that God threatens to inflict on the Chosen People in the Book of Deuteronomy?

No less controversial is the single greatest achievement of the Jewish people in the last two thousand years—the founding of a Jewish homeland in Palestine in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Modern political Zionism can be seen as the latest of the many Judaisms, a fulfillment of the oldest and most pious aspiration of the Jewish people by a generation of Jews who were willing to pick up a gun and fight. Yet Zionism is condemned by some ultraobservant Jews who believe “with perfect faith,” as Maimonides puts it, that Jewish sovereignty in the Holy Land must await the coming of the Messiah.4 For some Jews, Zionism is the ultimate betrayal of Judaism, and for other Jews, Zionism is Judaism. That is why many secular Jews in Israel regard citizenship in a Jewish state as the single most authentic expression of their Jewishness, and a few ultraobservant Jews affirm their allegiance to the Palestine Liberation Organization in preference to the State of Israel.

The War Among “Judaisms”

Diversity of belief and practice is so characteristic of Judaism, in fact, that it is the stuff of both somber Talmudic commentary and countless Jewish jokes. A story is told, for example, about a Jewish castaway who is plucked from a tropical island after being stranded for thirty years. He insists on conducting his rescuers on a tour of the island, proudly showing them all the comforts and conveniences that he built for himself during his long years of solitude—a cabin, a vegetable garden, a well, and not one but two synagogues.

“Why two synagogues?” asks the captain of the ship.

“To that one,” answers the castaway, pointing to one of the synagogues, “I never go!”

Now, it’s perfectly true that the sheer number of factions within the Jewish community—and the bitter frictions between them—are sometimes laughable. Among the ultraobservant Jews who live in self-contained neighborhoods around New York, all of whom pride themselves on the strict observance of the dietary laws of kashrut, the followers of one rabbi will sometimes reject another rabbi’s heksher—the seal of approval indicating that a food product has been deemed kosher by a particular rabbi. When a prominent Conservative rabbi in Los Angeles invited a leading Orthodox rabbi to join him at a Friday evening service in a gesture of Jewish ecumenicalism, the Orthodox rabbi accepted the invitation—but when the service started, he pointedly retreated to a corner and prayed with his back to the congregation. And some of the ultraobservant Jews of the Mea Shearim district in Jerusalem, who believe that the founding of the Jewish state was an act of apostasy, have used crudely printed scrip to avoid sullying their hands with the currency of the State of Israel.

Still, the war among Judaisms is not always a laughing matter. When a Conservative synagogue in Brooklyn was defaced with a swastika and set afire, for example, the culprits turned out to be not neo-Nazi skinheads but a gang of radical Jews who called themselves “T.O.R.A.H.”—“Tough Orthodox Rabbis and Hasids.” Jewish men and women who dare to pray together at the Western Wall in Jerusalem are likely to be pelted with rocks and dirty diapers by ultraobservant Jews: “Go back to Germany,” they taunt, “and let them finish the job!” Tragically, an obscure point of Talmudic law was invoked by a few Jewish zealots to justify the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli war hero and political leader...