A Novel God: Looking at American Jewish Fiction
Every year at high holiday services I look to see what people are reading.
Of course, almost everyone who isn’t gazing off into space dutifully follows along in standardissue machzors, but I’m always pleased to spot a fellow congregant or two surreptitiously zipping through a novel of recent vintage.
I’m too committed to the liturgy myself to read fiction while everybody’s davening – and for me, a literary critic and scholar, it would feel too much like a day at the office to read a novel at synagogue. I do applaud these people’s instincts, though; as secular and skeptical as it may seem on the surface, American Jewish literature can offer resonant and compelling musings on the question of our relationships with God. In the spirit of the yamim noraim (Days of Awe), let me offer some examples, drawn from a few of the 125 works of fiction discussed in my recently published book, American Jewish Fiction: A JPS Guide.
Modern fiction sometimes approaches God very much as the liturgy does. Some of the most powerful Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur prayers, such as Avinu Malkeinu and Anu Amecha, present images and metaphors, comparisons meant to make God comprehensible to us. Calling God a father or a king, a shepherd or a vineyard- keeper – and ourselves God’s sons or subjects, sheep or grapes – the rabbis projected their knowledge of the world around them onto the divinity. Will Eisner is up to something similar in the title story of his pioneering graphic novel, A Contract with God (1978).
In this comic book story for adults, a pious Jew named Frimme Hersh draws up a contract between himself and his maker. After many years, Frimme’s adopted daughter dies, and Frimme understands this as God breaking His end of the deal. Frimme trades his piety for hedonism, shaves his head, and shacks up with a floozy. As one critic has pointed out, it isn’t a modern Jewish practice to make individual contracts with God; for one thing, the Kol Nidrei service on Yom Kippur nullifies any such promises. Yet Eisner’s story must be understood as a metaphor. He began working on it in the 1970s, after losing his own daughter to cancer, which made him feel betrayed by the universe. What better way to express that emotion than through the image of a broken contract with God? And, as one of Eisner’s characters remarks, “Is not all religion a contract between man – and God?”
Often, like Eisner, novelists tell tales of skepticism and doubt, faith and fear, painting portraits of unconventionally religious Jews. Take Saul Bellow’s Moses Herzog, the hero of Herzog (1964). Herzog writes letters to people living and dead, and in a moment of particular poignancy scrawls “several lines” to God Himself: “How my mind has struggled to make coherent sense,” he writes. “I have not been too good at it. But have desired to do your unknowable will, taking it, and you, without symbols. Everything of intensest significance. Especially if divested of me.” Herzog’s honest acknowledgment of his own insignificance echoes some of the loveliest lines from the machzor, which compare humans to a “passing shadow,” that most ephemeral of sights.
An equally profound and even more textured understanding of God can be found in a wonderful novel that appeared a few years after Bellow’s: Judy Blume’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret (1970). Margaret can be read as a preteen Herzog, a believer despite herself who both trusts in God and questions Him. She starts out asking for favors—she implores Him, “Don’t let New Jersey be too horrible,” and asks for help growing into her new bra, treating God more like Santa Claus than a deity. But she attends synagogue and church, hoping to find God there, to no avail. “I didn’t really feel you God,” she says. “I’m more confused than ever. I’m trying hard to understand but I wish you’d help me a little.” She discovers that it is easier to connect with divinity by herself than when she is in a community: “Why God? Why do I only feel you when I’m alone?” How many faithful Jews, I wonder, have glanced up at a slowly moving minute-hand during musaf on the second day of Rosh Hashanah and pondered this same question?
God makes a particularly fascinating cameo in Daniel Fuch’s first novel, Summer in Williamsburg (1934). A vast social panorama of life in Brooklyn, Fuch’s book presents the lives of businessmen and crooks, children and philosophers manqué, somewhat in the style of great 19th-century social novelists like Balzac, Tolstoy, or Zola. Unlike his predecessors, though, Fuchs acknowledges explicitly what other epic novels usually only imply: that the perspective from which the novel views life is none other than the all-knowing, all-seeing God’s. And this is not just any God, but an absolutely clichéd one: “High up, a million miles into the sky, God sits on a big cloud. He looks absentmindedly about. His beard is long and very white, the flesh of His face is gnarled.” With the chutzpah of a talented first-time novelist, Fuchs aligns his perspective with this one: “This is life, not as a novelist sees it but as God in His all-knowing wisdom does.”
Yet God does not provide much help to Fuchs’ characters. One complains that “terrible things are happening all the time because there is no more a God over America.” Another, ruined in business, cries out, “Why, God, why do You send me so many burdens all at the same time, what did I do?” Fuchs’ narrator recognizes that such complaints mostly go unheeded. “We must forgive God for His apathy,” the narrator muses, offering a perfectly appropriate prayer for the high holidays. “It has been a hot summer and He is a little tired of us, we never vary the show.”
None of these novels offers a simple vision of God, nor do they issue clear directives for how we, as Jews, should relate to our Rock and Redeemer. Yet they provide examples of Jews like us who struggle to understand the world and our place in it through Jewish tradition. These books aren’t holy by any means, but like narratives in the Tanach and the Talmud, like the tales of Nachman of Bratslav and other chasidic storytellers, they can help us to understand what holiness might be. So if you look over at your fellow congregants during services this year and see something other than a machzor in their hands, don’t assume that they have no interest in God. Consider that they might be praying with a different set of words and images.
Dr. Joshua Lambert is the author of American Jewish Fiction: A JPS Guide (2009) and is the Dorot Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow in NYU’s department of Hebrew and Judaic studies. His website is www.epikores.com.
