To Be a Jew or Not to Be

 

TO BE A JEW OR NOT TO BE

BY

DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS

It is not all in the nose. 

“Your father is a Jew! A Jew, I say! Just look at his nose!” screeched my born-again stepmother, from above her craggy Mongolian beak when I returned to Kansas for a brief visit - I instinctively rubbed my own smallish and cute nose at her proclamation.

My father had been rather quiet about race and religion throughout my childhood. After my stepmother’s astounding revelation – she made me sit down on the couch to hear it – he laughed and confessed that he was indeed of Hebrew descent. He claimed Jeremiah as his distant ancestor, and said he was sure the true Messiah would come when the Temple was rebuilt.

“Just remember this, if you get into trouble,” he said to me in a conspiratorial tone, “you have a right to become a citizen of Israel.” And then this laconic epilogue: “Remember the seed that fell on rocky ground.” I had not the slightest idea of what he was talking about at the time – since then I have made certain inquiries into the faith, as is evident below.

According to a rabbi from a neighborhood synagogue who visited the lobby of my Miami Beach residential hotel forty years after my stepmother’s announcement in Kansas, and quizzed the guests on our genesis, my father’s Jewish generation does not automatically make his son an authentic Jew: Only the visible emergence of a baby from the womb of a known Jewess, the rabbi insisted, proves the offspring is Jewish.

My father’s Jewish mother, incidentally, converted to Catholicism. She would not allow the word ‘Jew’ to be pronounced in her home after her conversion, as if the Nazis were listening in. My own mother was a gentile, allegedly a descendent of the Mennonites who settled in Oregon in the early days. She died shortly after my birth, a victim of the polio epidemic and shortage of respirators at the Phoenix hospital. She was the Unknown Goddess of my childhood, the Lady to whom I prayed. I do not consciously remember her, but no other deity existed as far as I was concerned

The festive occasion for the rabbi’s visit to our dilapidated South Beach residential hotel was Sukkot. His ostensibly benevolent religious mission was to find forlorn, forsaken, and feeble old Jews therein, and to get them to rub together a large wrinkled lemon and palm branch while mumbling a sacred verse in Hebrew – I  think it was one of David’s psalms, exulting Yahweh.  It might as well have been a song about me, given my own good name, a name that has been a virtual stone about my neck.  When I was a small boy, little old ladies told me that my name made me the most beloved of all, for David slew the giant, sang and danced, and was the first king of his nation. They neglected to mention the crimes against humanity one had to commit in the Lord’s name to become a king in those days.

Now I have sung and I have danced. And I have almost slain my Davidian delusion of grandeur; rather, I am sometimes impressed by the grandeur of my insignificance. I am a king of nothing, sent out to pasture with small hope that I am the rejected stone that shall become the keystone of some great monument to human vanity – perchance a book if not a kingdom. Yes, the rabbi rejected me: the question – Jew to be or not to be – apparently was settled. No, said the rabbi, I could not participate in the shady festival of Sukkot because my mother was not Jewish. I did not beg to disagree with him: I smiled wanly and kept my disappointment and dissenting thoughts to myself.

First of all, I thought, rubbing four not two species of things together symbolizes the different kinds of people who take shelter together during bad times. One might think everyone would be equally welcome when all hell breaks loose, thus anyone who wanted shelter would gladly have it.  According to prophetic tradition, our times are troubled times and there is going to be the usual hell to pay for the general corruption during this particular reign of greed cultivated by the high harlots of the gilded cult of individualism, for whom life is the hoarding of the most precious products and the digital tokens of exchange if not gold and jewels.

That is not to say that everyone is consumed by consumption and will be roasted by hellfire; it’s just that too many people must rent out their bodies and souls, literally prostitute themselves in order to produce an inordinate amount of trash, junk, and garbage, to keep each other preoccupied with something besides their plight and have a place to sleep and a bite to eat.

If anyone who so wished to do so could pitch a tent or build a hut on common ground and become one of God’s Diggers, perhaps half the population, if relieved of the burden of paying rent and working slavish jobs, might resign forthwith and take up camping. But that just would not do as far as the landlords are concerned, although the communist Lord of the Land might not mind at all – and why would an omnipotent lord want to think about anything at all in the first place? Furthermore, the huts would not be up to building codes, and the ground would have no assessed taxable value, for the land of plenty would no longer be made artificially scarce, which would put the whole structure of civilized society at risk.

Shelter, no matter how shabby, brings people together when they need it. Once they have it, they might want something much better, and a few might even be willing to do whatever it takes to pay high rents in order to “keep the riff raff out.” The alienated, shabbily dressed residents of our seedy residential hotel huddled in the lobby when the lights went out during a hurricane a few days before Sukkot. For the first time, almost everyone got to know each other. The more illustrious residents were appalled when they discovered that many of their neighbors were mentally ill, drug-addicted, alcoholic, and criminally inclined, wherefore they quit the premises for better resorts the very next month. The rest were evicted a few weeks later by a prominent landlord, developer, and leading member of the Jewish community. He reportedly sold our crack-infested and prostitute-ridden shelter to the luxurious party-hotel across the street, the Delano Hotel, owned by the Morgan Hotel Group; the corruption will now be upgraded to relative respectability and sanctioned by the city. Off duty policemen were hired to secure the building and to kick down the doors of anyone who refused to get out; the Miami Beach Police Department was called several times, all the way up to the rank of captain, but to no avail.

As the visiting rabbi polled our lobby for real Jews, I explained that almost all the elderly Jews had been evicted a few months prior; the old folks were given the appropriate 30-day notice, but were summarily ordered into vans a few days later and taken to the Hebrew home for the elderly – also owned and operated by the landlord’s family – where they were doubled up in small rooms at the same price. An old man called the police during the forced exodus, but to no avail: He was senile and in further need of assisted care, a caregiver explained to ward off the cops.  The manager had often complained that it was simply too expensive to provide assisted-care living at the facility – feeding the old folks and paying for unlicensed caregivers was especially costly. Besides, a number of them were not paying their bills; those who could not pay the price at the eviction and had no one to take them had to obtain shelter from public services – one old woman now plies her panhandling trade on fabulous Lincoln Road Mall, from a homeless shelter nearby.

So we the remnant would also be exiled from our dwelling. We were also given our 30-day notice, and, a few days later, we too were asked to get out right away so that the annexation to the party hotel could proceed at once. And then I recalled that seventy gentiles from seventy nations had offered seventy bullocks as tribute to Israel when the culmination of humble Sukkot was eventually upgraded to a fabulous party in the City of Peace. Seventy angels were mentioned in reference to the seasonal gathering, and it was written that the entire world would eventually rejoice in the shade of the Lord’s Tabenacle. Shelter shall at least be provided for the Remnant of Yahweh’s judgment and destruction:

“For, over all, the glory of Yahweh will be a canopy and a tent to give shade by day from the heat, refuge and shelter from the storm and rain.... Your eyes are going to look on a king in his beauty, they will see an immense country; your heart will look on its fears: where is he who counted, where is he who weighed out, where is he who counted the precious stones? You will no longer see the overweening people, the people of obscure, unintelligible speech, of barbarous, senseless tongue. Look on Zion, city of our feasts, your eyes will see Jerusalem as a home that is secure, a tent not to be moved: its pegs not pulled out, not one of its ropes broken.”

In any case, the rabbi was eager to inform me that, since I am not Jewish on my mother’s side, an application filed for expedited Israeli citizenship would be automatically denied. At least, I thought to myself, I would qualify for a holocaust given my Jewish father. But the rabbi’s rejection convinced me that my father was not very Jewish at all, for had he not told me that I would immediately be accepted as a Jew in Israel simply because he was my father?

I suppose the evidence of modern biological testing would never be accepted as proof of Jewishness, whatever that might be. Thus far it proves there is no such thing as a Jewish strain of the human race, although there is evidence for the persistence of an inbreed priestly group whose members include some black Africans who have practiced a form of Judaism from time immemorial but whose Jewishness was denied until the irrefutable test results came in. As for the infamous Jewish Nose Test, it gives false positives after so many centuries of seed-mixing: the ungainly nose attributed to Jews is reportedly the old Hittite nose of the north, whereas the southern semitic people had a rather cute little nose, like mine, for example.

 “You are not a Jew,” the rabbi reiterated in parting. “You must find out where you came from and who you are.”

There it is, again, I am not a Jew, I thought, and the thought saddened me for some strange reason, for who in their right mind would want to be a member of an outcast and scapegoat people, hated by professed lovers because they purportedly killed the God of Love? I am not-a-Jew, I am a reject, a refused one, not even part of the sacrificial herem set aside and devoted to the God of Death. Will I then be spared the Great Holocaust? Will I be rejected by the Draft Board, wind up smoking pot instead of breathing the fumes from the burning body of Israel? Egads! Will I miss Gilgulim, the Great Restoration? By Gum, may Heaven forbid!

I received the definite impression from the rabbi that he was a teacher of some stereotypically standoffish cult of the main religion, a sort of cult we find within all religions, where love is hate-based love; that is, a love for one’s own group is founded on the hatred of other groups. There are of course several types of stereotypical Jews; for instance, the greedy type which my former landlord’s family has been recently associated with: not only was our shabby shelter sold, rents have been drastically raised on dozens of other once cheap apartment buildings owned by members of the family.  But I personally do not believe in the greedy-Jew stereotype, for that blames human greed on a people who are not greedier than any other people. The prophets warned the Jews about the terrible consequences of piling up junk on Earth instead of worshipping the Lord and amassing treasure in Heaven.  In fact, Jews have been far more generous to the needy than other peoples over the centuries, so much so that the Catholic Church adopted the charitable Jewish institution Indeed, the now infamous South Beach family was until two years ago famous for providing very reasonably priced accommodations. South Beach is being gentrified, meaning that the gentry are getting rid of the riff raff – low-income workers and retired people are being forced out.  Is that the fault of the Jews?

Of course the stereotypical greedy Jew has its foundation in the fact that Jews employed bookkeepers to account for their transactions early on. Economy, the human relationship with the environment, is of fundamental importance for any culture that would survive its history of need. The bookkeepers who managed the treasury eventually told a story: If greedy Hebrews misbehaved, in groundless hatred for one another, or in an adulterous love affair with the idols of other peoples, then an unknown god would disturb the natural course of things to work the ruin of the nation – leaving perchance a few good Jews for atonement and revival meetings, for the death of all Hebrews would be the death of their tribal god. Jews were moved to set themselves apart to bear witness to this sublime god, insisting he was the one and only god; wherefore the gentiles treated them accordingly, and in self-contempt they lashed them to the dirty economic post while occupying themselves with the nobler tasks of making war on one another in the name of the Almighty Terrorist and looting the world over.

Many were the mass murders executed in the holy name of the dissident rabbi who overturned the money tables and spoke of a different sort of accounting; I mean the last god who was put to death - the martyr who believed that a life of killing is not worth living, in marked contrast to the belief of the patriot, that a life not worth killing for is not worth living.  He was a Jew. But I am not a Jew, according to the rabbi, therefore his Bride will not give me shelter. I asked my father if his ancestor, Jeremiah, was homeless. He said Jeremiah had not been alienated and stoned to death as rumored, but had escaped to what is now known as Scotland, where his name appears in our family tree, on an ancient stone in the foundation of an ancient stone shelter. 

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Available Now: The Seed That Fell on Rocky Ground