Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(159)
“That’s sad.”
“It is, isn’t it?”
“On a few levels.”
“What would you make it?” Jacob asked.
“A Star of David would require some serious double-jointedness.”
“Maybe a palm on the top of the head?”
“Not bad,” Julia said, “but it doesn’t account for women. Or the great majority of Jewish men, like you, who don’t wear yarmulkes. Maybe palms open like a book?”
“Very nice,” Jacob said, “but are illiterate Jews not Jews? Are babies?”
“I wasn’t thinking that it was reading a book, but the book itself. The Torah, maybe. Or the Book of Life. How do you sign life?”
“Remember from Life is long?” he said, once again making his hands into guns, and then moving the forefingers up his torso.
“So like this,” Julia said, putting her hands in front of her, unpeeling them like a book, and then moving those upturned palms up her torso, as if pushing a book through her lungs.
“I’ll run it up the flagpole next time the Elders of Zion convene.”
“What’s the sign for gentile?”
“Gentile? Who f*cking cares?”
Julia laughed, and Jacob laughed.
“I can’t believe you knew a language all alone.”
Eliezer Ben-Yehuda single-handedly revived Hebrew. Unlike most Zionists, he wasn’t passionate about the creation of the State of Israel so that his people would have a home. He wanted his language to have a home. He knew that without a state—without a place for Jews to haggle, and curse, and create secular laws, and make love—the language wouldn’t survive. And without a language, there wouldn’t ultimately be a people.
Ben-Yehuda’s son, Itamar, was the first native speaker of Hebrew in more than a thousand years. He was raised forbidden to hear or speak any other language. (His father once berated Itamar’s mother for singing a Russian lullaby.) His parents wouldn’t allow him to play with other children—none of them spoke Hebrew—but as a concession to his loneliness they gave him a dog with the name Maher, meaning “fast” in Hebrew. It was a kind of child abuse. And yet it is possible that he is even more responsible than his father for the first time a modern Jew ever told a dirty joke in Hebrew, ever told another Jew to f*ck off in Hebrew, ever typed Hebrew into a court stenography machine, ever shouted unmeant words in Hebrew, ever, in Hebrew, moaned in pleasure.
Jacob put the last dried mugs back on the shelf upside down.
“What are you doing?” Julia asked.
“I’m doing it your way.”
“And you’re not hysterically concerned about their ability to dry without proper circulation?”
“No, but neither am I suddenly convinced they’re going to fill with dust. I’m just tired of disagreeing.”
God instructed Moses to put both the intact tablets and the broken tablets in the ark. The Jews carried them—the broken and the whole—for their forty years of wandering, and placed them both in the Temple in Jerusalem.
Why? Why didn’t they just bury them, as would befit a sacred text? Or leave them behind, as would befit a blasphemy?
Because they were ours.
VII
THE BIBLE
HOW TO PLAY SADNESS
It doesn’t exist, so hide it like a tumor.
HOW TO PLAY FEAR
For a laugh.
HOW TO PLAY CRYING
At my grandfather’s funeral, the rabbi told the story of Moses being discovered by Pharaoh’s daughter. “Look!” she said after opening the basket. “A crying Hebrew baby.” He asked the kids to try to explain what Pharaoh’s daughter said. Benjy suggested that Moses was “crying in Jewish.”
The rabbi asked, “What would it sound like to cry in Jewish?”
Max took a step forward, toward the unfilled grave, and said, “Maybe like laughing?”
I took a step back.
HOW TO PLAY LATE LAUGHTER
Use humor as aggressively as chemo. Laugh until your hair falls out. There is nothing that can’t be played for a laugh. When Julia says, “It’s just the two of us. Just you and me on the phone,” laugh and say, “And God. And the NSA.”
HOW TO PLAY THE DEATH OF HAIR
No one has any idea how much hair he has—both because our hair can’t be fully seen with our eyes (not even with multiple mirrors, believe me) and because our eyes are our own.
Sometimes, when they were still young enough not to question the question—and could be trusted not to mention it to others—I would ask the boys how bald I was. I’d bow to them, adjust my hair to reveal where I thought it was thinning, and ask them to describe me to me.
“Looks normal,” they’d usually say.
“What about here?”
“Pretty much the same as everyone else.”
“But it doesn’t seem like there’s less right here?”
“Not really.”
“Not really? Or no?”
“No?”
“I’m asking for your help here. Could you give it a real look and then give me a real answer?”
What there was of my hair was a prop, the product of pharmaceutical intervention—the tiny hands of Aaron and Hur clutching my roots from inside my skull. I blamed my balding on genetics, and I blamed it on stress. In that way, it was no different from anything else.