After decades in Chabad and other haredi and Orthodox communities, I concluded that logic dictated that God—at least as Jews have usually defined Him—does not exist. But at the same time, I still had a personal belief in that God, something rooted deep inside of me, a belief that transcended logic.

Then I bought a copy of God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens, who died last month at the age of 62. When the book arrived I nervously leafed through it, read the first few pages, and placed God is Not Great on a table next to my reading chair, where it sat for years untouched, on the bottom of what became a very large pile. In other words, I chickened out.

So, there I was, a cowardly atheist and a blind believer—a paradox that remained tenuously in place until Hitchens died in December.

In the wake of Hitchens’ death, I read comments from Orthodox Jews rejoicing over the news. One even wrote that Jewish law mandates that Jews should make a “festive meal” to rejoice that Hitchens had suffered and died from the same type of painful death some of them had openly wished for me. I could be a coward no longer. I dug Hitchens’ book out of that pile. I flipped it open to a random chapter and began to read about Hitchens’ view of … pigs.

***
In case you don’t know, pigs aren’t kosher. It is a statement so axiomatic that for most Jews, making it is akin to saying the sky is blue or snow is cold. But why is it that pigs are taboo? Pigs have cloven hoofs, a sign an animal is kosher to eat. But pigs are not ruminant animals and therefore do not chew their cud, which means pigs lack the other mandatory sign designating a kosher animal. And unlike the rabbit or the camel, which also lack one sign—or even shellfish, which is called an “abomination” by the Torah—the pig has become (and most likely always was) the paradigm of trayf. Why?

Midrashic literature composed long after the Torah was written sees the pig as deceptive; its cloven hoofs beckon the unsuspecting Jew and encourage him to eat the pig’s flesh, when in reality the pig is, well, chazzer trayf—an object of disgust and revulsion.

Years ago, just before my leap into ultra-Orthodoxy, I was at a friend’s parents’ house for the first time. We were in the kitchen looking for something to eat. My friend stopped his search to point out which cabinets and drawers had the meat dishes and which had the dairy dishes. I noticed one cabinet and one drawer had been overlooked. “What’s in those?” I asked. “Oh, they’re trayf. We use them when we bring home Chinese food,” he said without a trace of guilt. “You mean like pork fried rice?” I asked, not sure that I really understood him. “No,” he said with distain, “we would never eat pork.” “Shrimp?” I asked, perplexed. “Sure,” he answered. “But never pork. We would never eat pork.”

Archaeological digs in Israel have uncovered ancient biblical-era Israelite settlements where remains of shellfish are plentiful, but pig bones were not found. And even today there are many Jews like my friend’s family who eat shrimp and crab without a trace of guilt but would never eat pork. What could be so bad about pigs?

Anthropologist Marvin Harris believed Judaism’s pork taboo had practical origins. Pigs need lots of water to cool off in. They also need shade and a large amount of farmer-raised grain in order to survive—all things goats, sheep, and cattle don’t require. Pigs, Harris noted, compete with humans for grain and water, which man desperately needs in order to survive and which are scarce resources in much of the Middle East, including Israel. I would add that goats, sheep, and cattle can all be easily milked. Pigs cannot. That means the only way ancient humans could benefit from pigs was to slaughter them, and this made pigs even less cost effective to raise.

Other anthropologists, like the late Mary Douglas, see the pork taboo and other Jewish food taboos as separations between the “normal” and the “abnormal.” The ban on shellfish would be to separate the “normal” fish with fins and scales Israelites knew from the “abnormal” fish without them. The ban on pork would be to separate “normal” farm animals like sheep, goats, and cattle the Israelites were used to from the “abnormal” pig. This would have been an attempt to bring order to what ancient Israelites saw as a disorderly world, and an attempt to effect order on high.

Both Harris and Douglas touched on points that are, I think, reasons behind the taboo, but they don’t explain the venom with which Israelites and later Jews have viewed pigs for millennia. For that, dear readers, you have to turn to, of all people, Hitchens.

In God is not Great, Hitchens notes uneasy similarities between humans and pigs: Porcine DNA and human DNA are very similar, so much so that porcine heart valves can be transplanted into humans; pigs are noticeably smarter than other farm animals; and pig skin looks almost human, so much so that the smell and look of suckling pig and roasting human infants is, according to those who have had the misfortune of smelling and seeing both, disconcertingly similar. And make no mistake about it—many ancient Israelites had that misfortune. Hitchens thought this was the basis for the Jewish taboo against eating pork.

Hitchens’ understanding makes complete sense—especially if you extend the argument even further.

All meat consumption by Israelites originally required the animal be sacrificed to God. The choice parts were burned to soothe God—a necessary precaution in a world where natural disasters, disease, rampant infant mortality, death of an alarming number of women in childbirth, and famine had no other explanation than an angry or distracted god—or given to the priests to eat, and the remnants were eaten by the Israelite offering the sacrifice and those joining with him for that meal. Generations later, long after the taboo against eating pork had already been in place, non-sacrificial meat was allowed to be consumed. That means if pigs were kosher, Israelite worshippers would have smelled something eerily similar to the smell that emanated from pagan places of worship—if, as the Hebrew Bible claims, human child sacrifice was indeed practiced by the Israelites’ neighbors—and the Israelite priests would also have been seen consuming meat that bore a disturbing resemblance to those horrific pagan sacrifices. Would Israelites, who were then mostly illiterate, think that the Torah allowed human sacrifice? Would pig sacrifice cause Israelites to sacrifice their infants the way Torah claimed Israel’s neighbors did? Or could it be that the similarities alone were thought to be displeasing to God, regardless of how Israelites would or would not react to them? When understood in this context, and when we take into account the alarming frequency with which the Hebrew Bible says our ancient ancestors reverted to pagan worship, the taboo against eating pork takes on new meaning.

Hitchens dismissed Judaism’s anti-pork taboo as a Bronze Age superstition. But was it? Or was the Torah—divine, divinely inspired, or simply man-made—trying to do whatever it could to wean humans away from the perceived need to murder their own children? We may never know for sure—although Hitchens’ contribution has arguably done more to explain the reason behind our pork taboo than the 2,000 years of rabbinic commentary that preceded it.

I still irrationally believe there might be something—some being, some force, some deity—who is greater than us and who is there, watching, waiting for us to become just and good and kind. I don’t think this god has any real anger for Christopher Hitchens. On the contrary, I think this god must find it deliciously amusing that a half-Jewish atheist was able to decipher the basis of a religious mystery thousands of years old. Over the two millennia of Rabbinic Judaism, many of its leaders told their followers to accept truth from wherever and whomever it comes. That idea has fallen out of favor as the fundamentalism Hitchens so hated has grown to become the ultra-Orthodox (and even Modern Orthodox) norm. And that’s a shame, because in this case the truth—the Torah—comes from Christopher Hitchens, and the people who would truly cherish it the most will likely never allow themselves to read it.

2. My daughter has taken to drawing a curious form, a kind of sign: It’s a U shape at the ends of which are arrows. As iconography it could be read as a smile, or instructions for a U-Turn.

“What does it mean?” I ask.

“It means you should get off the computer.”

3. Much of my conflicted feeling about Jewishness can be summed up in a single pronoun, and it is not “I” or “thou.” It is “us.” Also, the implied corollary, opposite in both meaning and mood: “them.”

I root for Jewishness like I root for the Knicks. In fact my fealty to the Knicks, inevitably mixed with disgust and contempt, seems expressly Jewish. The whole Patrick Ewing saga, in which Knicks fans heaped contempt and frustration on Ewing for years until they no longer had him, at which point they more or less fell in love with him or at least his memory and yearned for the Ewing years, which immediately seemed like golden years when judged by their aftermath, seemed an explicitly Jewish conundrum, which in turn makes me all the more happy to root for the Knicks.

To have been a Knicks fan in the Ewing era was akin to being a Jew who says, “Next year in Jerusalem.” As Rich Cohen pointed out in his book Israel Is Real, Jerusalem was there to be visited for thousands of years and yet it was always out of reach, as though a mirage that existed in another dimension.

4. A friend—Catholic if you are keeping score, and observant—writes:

I said “Happy holidays” to a woman in the laundry room yesterday and with pert self satisfaction and Irish piety (the absolutely most infuriating kind) she shot back, “Merry Christmas to you,” and walked out. I wanted to chase her down the hallway shouting “I’m a Jew, I’m a Jew goddamn it, not everyone has to believe what you fucking believe.” But I didn’t. Wouldn’t be fair to the Jews really.

5. My wife—not Jewish—recently discovered Curb Your Enthusiasm and tore through all the episodes over a period of a couple of months. Midway through this Curb-a-thon, I remarked that she seemed to have a thing for contentious Jews.

“Only on TV,” she said.

6. I come from an aristocracy of Jewish atheism. This may sound like a contradiction, but tell that to the members of the kibbutz where my mother grew up—a socialist and explicitly atheist commune dedicated to building a country that would serve as a homeland for Jews.

My mother was at the kibbutz because her mother had taken her there from Berlin when my mother was 1 year old. My grandmother grew up in Berlin and was 18 years old when she read an article by Martin Buber that made a great impression on her. She grew up not knowing that she was Jewish, but she found that out around that time, either by that article, or through other incidence—she never made it clear to my mother, who therefore never could make it clear to me.

Continue reading: My grandmother and Martin Buber

“Shabbat?” I said. “Are you serious?”

My husband, you see, is a proudly secular Jew who thinks that religion amounts to at best harmless superstition and at worst nefarious brainwashing. He’s outwardly respectful of the religious, of course, and he has adapted admirably to my request that we keep kosher at home (even as he relishes his bacon cheeseburgers at restaurants). He dutifully sits through my family’s two lengthy Passover Seders every year. But he maintains that belief in God is as preposterous as belief in the tooth fairy.

So, it was somewhat shocking when he came up with this Shabbat idea, although I knew what had inspired it. We’d been feeling that something just wasn’t right about answering non-emergency work-related phone calls at 10:30 on a Friday night, or checking email reflexively upon awakening on Saturday. We yearned to carve out a space in our week to shut it all down.

This feeling was not unfamiliar to me. I have been on and off the Shabbat wagon for years as I’ve pinged among Orthodoxy Renewal, and all points between. At times I have kept Shabbat in ways that seem less like religious practice than like obsessive-compulsive disorder: I have pre-cut toilet paper; I have taped over the refrigerator light to prevent it from turning on; I have huffed up 14 flights of stairs in an elevator building; I have refrained from draining the water from a can of tuna lest I violate the rule against borer, or sorting. While I had experienced the sublime sensation that can arise through Sabbath observance, I could never muster enough spiritual certainty to say that it was essential.

So, here we were, my husband daring to acknowledge a value to Shabbat that has nothing to do with God, and me trying to let go of my internalized Orthodox expectations and accept that Shabbat need not be an all-or-nothing affair. Casting around to envision our own customized day of rest, we quickly found models. In the New York Times, Mark Bittman a few years ago popularized the term “secular Sabbath” to describe his practice of going tech-free for 24 hours. In last year’s The Sabbath World, Judith Shulevitz argued for observing some kind of Sabbath not necessarily because God said so but because it’s socially useful and psychologically beneficial. Advocating for a digital-free Sabbath is all the rage these days; there’s even a National Day of Unplugging, spearheaded by the media-savvy Jewish group Reboot, which recently released a no-irony-intended iPhone app that enables users to announce their unplugged status to their Facebook friends and Twitter followers.

After my husband and I decided to take the plunge, we came to the task of setting our parameters. We agreed that would shut down our phones and computers—really shut them down, none of that wimpy silent crap. We would light Shabbat candles. We would bless and drink wine (as well as gin martinis). We would try not to use money or travel except by foot, but, in an unapologetic departure from Orthodoxy, we would allow cooking, playing music, writing, and even occasional DVD-watching.

Our experiment began around New Year’s. On a Friday afternoon, we called our parents to remind them that we would be unreachable for a day, as if bidding them farewell before a long plane flight. We turned off our phones and computers with the kind of high drama that seemed to warrant its own blessing (“borei pri ha power button,” perhaps). Then we sat down and took a deep breath, suddenly becoming aware that we actually had lungs. On Saturday, we ate good food, took a walk, and read. We listened to music carefully, focused on every lyric and instrument. We played and laughed with our young daughter.

And there were corporeal pleasures too. Say what you will about hazelnut gelato or Swedish massage, but is there anything more indulgent than sex in the afternoon? I recalled the popular teaching that it’s a “double mitzvah” to have sex on Shabbat, as both observing the day of rest and having sex with your spouse are mitzvot.

But our greatest enjoyment was simply being suspended in a day of being rather than doing. Piled on the couch together as a family without the distractions of interactive technology, divorced from the acquisitive and aspirational impulses that drive most of modern life, we understood in the most visceral way how the deprivations one enforces on the Sabbath enable a kind of liberation. Our attention was reserved for each other. The world was overlaid with glittery stillness. We stepped back from the buzzing of our lives and said, “Here we are.” Without being able to articulate exactly what holiness is, we agreed that it felt holy. Even my non-believing husband, who did not revise his ideas about God, was convinced. He became nearly fanatical about Shabbat.

Secular justifications for the Sabbath are, of course, not new. In her book, Shulevitz reviews dozens of them, invoking Freud, Marx, and Hannah Arendt, and explaining the urge to observe a Sabbath based on community bonding, political utility, or common overwork. Even Abraham Joshua Heschel’s 1951 masterpiece, The Sabbath, can be read as a celebration of what he called the weekly “cathedral in time” for its positive effects on humanity, without necessitating belief in a supernatural God.

“To set apart one day a week for freedom,” Heschel writes, “a day on which we would not use the instruments which have been so easily turned into weapons of destruction, a day for being with ourselves, a day of detachment from the vulgar, of independence of external obligations, a day on which we stop worshipping the idols of technical civilization, a day on which we use no money, a day of armistice in the economic struggle with our fellow men and the forces of nature—is there any institution that holds out a greater hope for man’s progress than the Sabbath?”

It’s been nearly six months since we began observing our modified Sabbath. There have been relapses, certainly. We turned on the computer one Saturday to look up guitar chords for a certain song, and the next thing I knew we were absentmindedly scrolling through real-estate listings. On a few occasions, when an airplane flight or work meeting has been unavoidable on a Saturday, we have wondered if it would be so terrible to move Shabbat to Sunday.

But largely we have stuck with it. Mindful of the invocation to enjoy the seventh day with community, we invite family and friends over for Shabbat lunch, labeling the meal “brunch” and serving waffles and omelets, all the more comfortable for the secular. We fantasize, perhaps naively, that once our toddler daughter is allowed TV and computer time, we will continue to enforce Shabbat as a timeout from screen absorption. We explain to others why we don’t answer their phone calls on Saturdays and see them respond with equal amounts of amazement, admiration, and envy. Their eyes widen and they inquire in hushed tones, as if we had stumbled upon a stash of an amazing new illicit drug. Really? What’s it like?

What we tell them, with nearly evangelical fervor, is this: Shabbat is like exercising. You avoid it. You groan about it. You think of a million other things you would rather do. Finally, you drag yourself to do it and you feel amazing. You vow that you will keep doing it over and over again and become a whole new super healthy glowing you. You approach Oprahish levels of inner calm and rejuvenation. And you may just feel so present that you forget about your plugged-in life altogether. It’s a religious ritual that even an atheist can love.

God in the Quad [New Yorker; subscription only]

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader,” wrote Frost, and I really wish that he hadn’t. It sounds like something my mother might have said, somewhere between “Man plans and God laughs” and “There are no atheists in a foxhole.”

I have a few questions.

Does the fact that someone prays to God while in a foxhole make him a believer, or just a terrified human being confronting his imminent mortality? I’m not sure exactly what the faithful are getting at here. Are the organized religions so desperate for new members that they’ll accept a guy with—literally—a gun to his head? Wouldn’t “There are very few brave people in foxholes” be more emotionally accurate? How about “War tends to be a frightening and traumatic experience for its combatants, for whom the recovery process tends to be a long and arduous one?”

Secondly, if God laughs at man’s plans, doesn’t that make God a bit of an Omniscient Bastard? I happen to believe that He is, or at least tends to be, but it’s surprising to hear a believer of His be so honest about it. If a harmless dead poet hadn’t put me in such a bad mood I might even find this refreshing, but for now, all I can do is wonder why, if God truly does exhibit a callous derisiveness toward the needle-thin hope that is mankind’s only method of survival in the world He created, wouldn’t his representatives here on Earth try to, you know, spin that a bit? “Man plans and God laughs, uh, with you?”

Most irritating to me at the moment, though, is this Frost “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader” thing. Maybe it’s because I’m looking at a couple of years ahead of me in the writing of this thing, and the idea of two years of tears being some sort of baseline for acceptance into Club Literature

makes me want to pull someone’s hair out. I know what he meant, and I know he gets to “joy” later, but why is “tears” the first thing he thinks of—and the only part of that quotation anyone ever quotes? Sadness and tears have never been the goals of my reading, or my writing, and I can’t imagine why they would be. I thought that was the goal of the Drudge Report, of the Evening News: “Now With TWICE the Misery.” Murder, war, rape, global warming, global cooling. Then the five-second clip of the squirrel waterskiing. Tears in the writer? Tears in the reader? This is some kind of victory? Catharsis, I know. No amount of dragging a reader over the miserable coals of a writer’s miserable imagination can’t be excused by catharsis, by the waterskiing squirrel: The lovers live on, only without legs, a home, or a future. Oh, and she’ll get raped. Him, too. But they LIVE, damn it, they LIVE. Mother, father, and children are burned to death in a house fire, but a rat in hole somewhere has learned an important lesson about life. I’m not buying it. I purchase more novels than I can possibly write off as expenses (trust me, I’ve tried), and put most of them down before I’m a third of the way through. Call it laziness if you like. I call it prudence: I can only kill myself once, and I’d like the book that makes me do so to be really worth it. I’ve read enough of them through, though, to know that if there’s a baby, it will die. If there’s a dog, it will be shot. A heart, broken. A family, torn apart. A city, demolished. A tire, flattened. A toe, stubbed. A nail, bent. A cup of tea, spilled. But cathartic, always cathartic.

I guess I’m alone in these matters. To the religious, the paucity of atheists in strategic military trenches truly does indicate something special about belief, and the fact that man is a schmuck for even thinking he could make his way through life without the contemptuous laughter of God above his head is somehow, to the believers, reason for admiring Him all the more. And most people, if book reviews and Amazon customer comments are anything to judge by, really would prefer to curl up in a chair, read something horrible about the awfulness of people, the futility of life, the inescapability of fate, and the impossibility of love, cry until the snot of authentic art runs from their noses, and feel like they’ve gotten their $21.95 worth. I am not a happy-ending type of person. If the truth is (and the weight of the evidence seems to indicate it as so) that life sucks, at least help me through it. Laugh at the suckiness. Show me why the suckiness is so foolish, so temporary, so meaningless. Comedy is anger (the good comedy, anyway), so Christ, get angry. But get me through it; not just “it’s worse than you think,” but “it’s worse than you think, but it’s all pretty stupid.” You can’t go on, you’ll go on. And you’ll trade bowler hats a few times, too, and lose a shoe.

Julian Gough wrote recently about the respect tragedy is given over comedy, pointing out that the Greeks had it the other way around. Here’s what I’m thinking about tragedy and comedy: I’m thinking that tragedy is in the moment, and that comedy comes later. And that because tragedy is in the moment, it might—might—be more heartfelt, or might—might—be more moving, but because comedy demands distance, and because distance provides perspective, it seems to me to be the closer of the two to wisdom. There’s no doubt that the view of the man at war is valuable; personally, I would rather have the view of the man who was at war years ago, the man who can say with authority, “Wars pass” and “People move on” and “The guilty will be punished” and “Check it out, there’s a Major called Major Major,” the counsel of the one who can get above all the terror and fear beneath which the present buries us. Here’s what I hope for in Hell: that when I die and I go there, and they drag me down to the Punishment Floor, and they put me in a pot filled with boiling water perched atop a pile of burning coals, and when my flesh bubbles, and my tongue swells and my bones break, that I turn to look at the pot beside me, and the guy boiling in that pot turns to me and says, “Yes, but who’s the entrée?” If God really hates me, he’ll stick me in a pot beside a writer, a serious writer, who throws his head back and wails, “Oh, what fresh misery is this!”

“Satan?”

“What is it, Auslander?”

“Permission to leave my pot for a minute?”

“You can shit in your pot, vile sinner.”

“Yes, but I’d like to bash the writer’s face in, Sir.”

“Oh, sure,” says Satan, “Go ahead. I’ll get his arms.”

I admit I find it tempting to apply his insight to my own Abraham and Isaac drama. “For all its metaphysics, the story of the akedah is also a work of psychological realism,” as my friend says. Sure, there’s a larger historical purpose—to illustrate that the God of the Jews, unlike the other Middle Eastern pretenders, Moloch and Co., did not require an actual child sacrifice, merely the willingness, however anguished, to go that far. And yet the substitution of law for violence and cruelty—the foreskin rather than the whole thing, to take another instance—keeps a remembered trace of the violence that existed. We should be grateful that we do not sacrifice children. Still, law may always fall back into violence—or may become its own kind of violence.

Since his bar mitzvah, back in 1952, my father must have experienced something like this fall: He’d lost his trust in God, rather than his “faith” in God’s existence. Although he could talk the talk of scientific atheism, he probably felt something much closer to betrayal than liberation. That evolution, astronomy, and Jewish history itself seemed to show that God could not have existed did not really excuse Him for not existing. The Covenant had been broken for good. No surprises—but, as he told me, it was the Holocaust that really did it. The good news was that both sides of my family had been spared. And yet, for most others in our situation, such good fortune usually gave rise to the great postwar secular religion of American Jewish gratitude for liberal democracy, to the optimism and confidence found in the novels of Bellow and Philip Roth. For my father, on the other hand, our very luck became part of the case against God, a protest against history. Once my father fell out with God, he sought refuge in a cosmopolitan, European culture that had already ceased to exist when he began to dream about making it his home. What caring being could have permitted both such devastation and my father’s own delusion that a European bohemia could save him? There seemed a peculiar, personal quality to my father’s outrage when he spoke about not just the rottenness of the Germans and the Austrians; the weakness of the French; the stunned complicity of the Judenrat; the painful theodicy of the Hasidim, but also the failure of a whole idea of civilization.

While my father could be ambivalent or indifferent about most aspects of my Jewish education, when it came to the destruction of the Jews, he began early and stayed determined. I remember few of my parents’ arguments. But a big one erupted when, browsing the floor-level shelves, I discovered a three-volume German history of the Second World War, full of official Nazi photographs of everything from aerial bombardments to Zyklon B. I had no idea where my father had picked it up, but, in size alone, it was the most impressive book in our downstairs library. Of course I was initially drawn by the magnetic force of tanks, planes, flamethrowers—the real life paraphernalia that furnished my boyhood’s destructive fantasies. (Who even now understands the psychological pull of militarism?) When my mother found me leafing through these books one day, she ordered my father to hide them. At first he duly did so, on the top shelf of one of the dining room bookcases. A few weeks later, my mother caught me climbing the rickety wooden ladder she used as a shelf for plants. My father: “If he’s curious, he has a right to know the truth, and the truth can be terrible.” My mother: “If the truth looks like piled, burned-up bodies, I don’t want him to see it.”

The truth actually looked a good deal worse. In the end, my father offered to make a “selection”—the terrible irony of that word—and we sat down on the couch with the books. Later he made sure that I’d read one of the earliest and most comprehensive histories of the Holocaust, Lucy Dawidowicz’s War Against the Jews. There were the charts, with numbers before and after, but also the anecdotes, the strong narrative that revealed that the Nazis were always planning, yes, a war against the Jews. I read it in a weekend. It was hard to take God seriously after that. What world were we living in?

At this point, according to the conventions some novels have established (think of Howard Jacobson’s Kalooki Nights, or Art Spiegelman’s Maus), I should make some sort of joke, preferably at my own expense. Much of the last twenty years, at least, of Jewish culture has been spent trying to make our education in horror into a series of comic stereotypes. There are unintended hilarious (or should I say hysterical?) consequences of exposing tender, unformed Jewish minds to such truths. My father’s life, my life, ought to have been beautiful, but only in the movies, or in the eye of God. A little sweetness and light is called for, right? Must every document of civilization be a document of barbarism? And who wants to be cursed with the sense that every identification number could become a tattoo, that the efficient routines of modernity, from certain angles, cast vast shadows of mass, mechanical murder? What didn’t my family have to be grateful for? Plenty, as it turns out. So let me take us seriously, ever so unfashionably.

Pressed to come up with a one-word theological description for the oddly negative relationship to Judaism that comes if you approach the religion through the Holocaust, I’d settle on “gnostic.” My father’s god was either good but terminally weak, or a malevolent, tyrannical usurper of some other, better deity. A psychoanalyst might think of gnosticism as a split, a symptom of a rift unhealed by our consciousness: Most very young children will divide their parents into an absent good one and a present bad one, but sometimes, in broken or violent homes, the division endures past infancy, just as a jealous, jilted lover will feel his beloved has actually betrayed the best part of herself—the part that loved him. And yet in all these cases the split is oddly protective of the God, parent, or lover we’ve lost. The good parent might return, the beloved will come to her senses, the messiah will arrive.

Mosaic of Abraham and Isaac from the floor of the Duomo in Siena

And so, in our odd way, our family too kept a certain faith: We lit candles on Friday evenings, celebrated Passover—never too seriously or with too much zeal—to keep a tiny flicker of hope. In the broken world my father felt he inhabited, felt we all inhabited, that hope meant fidelity to the idea of the gap between the God we wanted and the one we had, the body he wanted and the one he’d been stuck with: fragile, diseased, powerless, and self-betraying.

It strikes me that this is a piece of self-description as much as anything else. Have I inherited these patterns of thought, or made them up and given them to my father to excuse myself? While writing all this, I somehow came to the conclusion that there’s no way my father wanted me bar mitzvahed, that he understood the ritual to be an impossible sacrifice on his part. My father would not make Abraham’s choice. And yet, to take the old story once more and put it on the plane of psychological realism, what choice did my father really have? The protective parent who would keep his child from harm and disappointment will inevitably fail. A parent must sacrifice his child so that the child may, eventually, become someone other than his child. It’s a minimal act of faith in the world, and it begins early, when we leave our children with babysitters, or in nursery school; it goes on when we send them off to college and then give them in marriage. So much can go wrong, can still go wrong. The stayed hand, the ram in the thicket, these are emblems of our luck, our hope that it will be alright. Of course, our children will never forgive us. And yet there is really no choice. What my friend didn’t say is that he also half believes that the akedah is a parable of necessity, not autonomy. If we defy the world for love of our children, our love itself—crazed, possessive, absolute—has gone wrong. My father was, I must often remind myself, already a sick man.

How old you were when you became aware of your own mortality?

I’ve always been aware of it in a certain sense. I was kind of a depressed kid. Not in a clinical sense, but depressed—it sounds like some bullshit egotistical intellectual thing—on an existential level.

A philosophical level?

Yeah. Something that I connected with at a young age was Woody Allen’s work because he talks about angst in a humorous way, but also on a kind of cultural, secular Jewish level as opposed to a religious one. As the years went on I got into a lot of trouble and made a lot of bad choices; I put myself in positions quite often where I tested the limits of my mortality.

Can you talk about the first one of those times that you remember?

Writing graffiti. I had romanticized graffiti culture from watching Style Wars, and I’d walked around New York and studied graffiti, from tags on the subway to South Brooklyn murals. What looked like vandalism to others looked like the markings of tribes to me. I was 12 or 13 the first time I went to write on the trains at the lay-ups—where they keep the trains when they’re out of service underground. You have to jump up under the tracks to get there. Between Canal Street and City Hall, there’s a whole underground station, where they keep trains overnight. And that was a moment where there was this great exhilaration of excitement and fear—knowing I was doing something with the threat of arrest, or assault because there’s a lot of violence in graffiti culture. And there’s the third rail. I finally stopped because I got slashed with a box cutter by another graffiti artist when I’d already started Soundviews. But there was something that drew me to it at the beginning, and that kept me going, that was tied to mortality. Risk, I guess.

You made a distinction a minute ago between a religious Jewish sense of mortality and a secular one. Is your family religious?

No. My dad’s grandfather was pretty religious. He went to temple every week, gave money to the temple when he could even though he was poor, and had a social existence within the community of Coney Island and Brighton. But around the time when word started coming into the States about what was going on in Germany and Eastern Europe—this is how the story goes, but there might be a little myth to it—he told the rabbi that he wasn’t coming back because either God didn’t exist because of what was happening or if God did exist and was allowing it to happen, he didn’t want to have anything to do with him. I’ve made it in my own head that that was where religion died in my family. My dad was bar mitzvahed, but he’s always been an atheist. My mom was always an atheist. My grandmother never seemed religious, but she really wanted me to get bar mitzvahed, and when I refused she was mad, really pissed off. I felt like it would be totally fake for me.

My dad told me, ‘Get bar mitzvahed, you’ll get a lot of presents.’ But I couldn’t. I was idealistic. At one point my parents asked me to go to Hebrew school because they wanted me to figure things out. They didn’t want to push their atheistic views on me.

But you knew for sure by then that you couldn’t believe in God?

I couldn’t believe in anything about religion. As I’ve gotten older I’ve embraced being Jewish on a cultural level, but I pretty much despise organized religion. I’ve struggled to separate identities. Are you a Jew? Is it a race? A religion? As a kid it was hard to understand.

It still is hard for me in some ways. It’s even hard to identify culturally or ethnically what makes us Jewish. You and I are both from Russian Jewish families, but there are Jews in China.

But they’ve adopted Judaism.

They’ve been in China for a thousand years.

There’s something in me: I know I’m Jewish, I understand the feeling. Have I forced myself to feel that? I don’t know. But I guess that is how the cultural oversoul or folk-soul works. It becomes part of your fabric. My mom is still an atheist, she doesn’t go to synagogue. But in the past few years I’ve joked with her that she’s the super-Jew. She volunteers at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, every book she reads has some Jewish theme to it. It’s hard to reconcile, but I dig it.

Do you feel that there’s a difference between being an active atheist and just not believing?

Oh, yeah. I hate definitions, but I suppose “active atheist” would mean that you think about it and ponder it rather than just saying “I don’t believe in God” and that’s it. I think I’ve gotten to a point where I’ve investigated it enough.

Are you actively against believing?

Camus said, “I can understand only in human terms. I understand the things I touch, things that offer me resistance.”

Resistance?

Actual physical resistance (presses his hand on table). When I first read that I was like, wow. Any of the concepts of God in any religion, Jewish or otherwise, from the white-bearded guy in the sky to some sort of abstract power that makes things happen, make no sense to me. I have trouble understanding how someone could think that’s real, except that they have blind faith.

It’s hard for me to look at organized religion and separate it from politics and history; religion has been used to control people so often. But that quote—”things that I can touch, things that offer me resistance”—we’re terribly limited, even sensorially. So, if you’re going to make existence only what we humans can see or touch, that’s smaller than what is out there.

I don’t even understand the concept of personal faith. I remember when I was young, smoking a lot of pot and reading all the obvious books that you do when you’re getting into 60s counterculture—Zen stuff, for instance, and Siddhartha. And I found that a little cooler, but I still felt that there was this absurdist level to it. I found a lot of it beautiful, and I think a lot of religious ceremony can be quite beautiful. I also think a lot of religious ceremony can be quite morbid and repressive.

If you don’t believe in God, how do you live day-to-day without becoming overwhelmed by the fact that you’re going to die?

Why can’t you have intellectual pursuits to deal with that rather than an irrational crutch? Look, I have respect for someone who’s really religious, they’ve investigated it, thrown themselves into it. The rabbi, the priest, the imam. But why is it that whether you’re really a good Jew or not, you get the fringe benefits from your religion? Jews place great emphasis on being charitable. I don’t see why you need a book or a rabbi to tell you that you should give to charity. I should give to others because I want to, not because I think it makes me a good Jew. What if you’re selfish, and deep down you don’t want to give? Then you’re being dishonest. Unless it can turn you around and make you good. But I don’t have that faith in people.

I’m sorry to say it, but it might be human nature to create religion. You could call some of the early cave paintings—depicting events that people wanted to happen, methods of making them happen—a form of religion.

Or government. What’s the difference? It’s in human nature to develop a system to govern, be it in a political, practical sense or in a moral sense. Religion’s like a moral government.

Can you expand on that?

I just came up with that, but I really like it. Religion and government are both dictating laws.

Maybe it’s the penalty for breaking the laws that’s different: what kind of punishment you wind up with. Spiritual? Physical? Economical?

I guess it’s a matter of where you get your sense of wrong and right. Bertrand Russell‘s writing on religion blows me away. Why I Am Not a Christian‘s lead essay, as well as most of the others, deals with religion and hypocrisy, but he was a total humanist, a leftist. He was a war protester from World War I through Vietnam. He wrote an antinuclear manifesto with Albert Einstein and was a founding member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. You can have these things without religion.

Should each person create their own system??

If they need a system. But I think each person should strive toward not having any system whatsoever.