For the Time Being (4 page)

“Just kidding,” he said. “Thank you very much.”

T H I N K E R
      
       In 135 C.E., the Romans killed Rabbi Akiva for teaching Torah. They killed him by flaying his skin and stripping his bones with currycombs. He was eighty-five years old. A Roman currycomb in those days was an iron scraper; its blunt teeth combed mud and burrs from horsehair. To flay someone—an unusual torture—the wielder had to bear down. Perhaps the skin and muscles of an old scholar are comparatively loose.

“All depends on the preponderance of good deeds,” Rabbi Akiva had said. The weight of good deeds bears down on the balance scales. Paul Tillich also held this view. If the man who stripped Rabbi Akiva’s bones with a currycomb bore
down with a weight of, say, two hundred psi, how many pounds of good deeds would it take to tip the balance to the good?

“Are we only talking to ourselves in an empty universe?” a twentieth-century novelist asked. “The silence is often so emphatic. And we have prayed so much already.”

(Since this book hails thinkers for their lights, and pays scant heed to their stripes, I should acknowledge here that Judaism and Christianity, like other great religions, have irreconcilable doctrinal differences, both within and without. Rabbi Pinhas: “The principal danger of man is religion.”)

Akiva ben Joseph was born in the Judean lowlands in 50 C.E. He was illiterate and despised scholarship; he worked herding sheep. Then he fell in love with a rich man’s daughter. She agreed to marry him only when he vowed to devote his life to studying Torah. So he did. He learned to read along with their son.

Rabbi Akiva systematized, codified, explained, analyzed, and amplified the traditional religious laws and practices in his painstaking Mishnah and Midrash. Because of Akiva, Mishnah and Midrash joined Scripture itself in Judaism’s canon. His interpretations separated Judaism from both Christian and Greek influences.

His contemporaries prized him for his tireless interpretation of each holy detail of Torah. They cherished him for his optimism, his modesty, his universalism (which included tolerance of, and intermarriage with, Samaritans), and his devotion to Eretz Israel, the Land of Israel. He taught that “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” is the key idea in Torah.

Nelly Sachs wrote,

Who is like You, O Lord, among the silent,

remaining silent through the suffering of His children?

E V I L
      
       Emperor Hadrian of Rome had condemned Rabbi Akiva to his henchman and executioner, Rufus. Rufus was present in the prison cell as the currycombs separated the man’s skin and muscles from his bones. Some of Rabbi Akiva’s disciples were there too, likely on the street, watching and listening at the cell window.

Rabbi Akiva had taught his disciples to say, “Whatever the all-merciful does he does for the good.” During Akiva’s innovative execution he was reciting the Shema, because it was the time of day when one recited the Shema. It was then that his disciples remonstrated with him, saying, “Our master, to such an extent?”

Spooked that the dwindling rabbi continued to say prayers, Rufus asked him, conversationally, if he was a sorcerer. Rabbi Akiva replied that he was happy to die for God. He said he had worshiped the Lord with all his heart, and with all his mind, and now he could add, “with all my soul.”

After Rabbi Akiva’s death, Elijah himself entered the Roman prison where his bloody skeleton lay, lifted it up, and, accompanied by many angels, took it to Caesarea in Israel. There Elijah deposited the remains in a comfortable cave, which promptly sealed itself and has never been found.

When Rabbi Akiva died, Moses was watching from heaven. Moses saw the torture and martyrdom, and complained to God about it. Why did God let the Romans flay an eighty-five-year-old Torah scholar? Moses’ question—the tough one about God’s allowing human, moral evil—is reasonable only if we believe that a good God causes, or at any rate allows, everything that happens, and that it’s all for the best. (This is the doctrine Voltaire, and many another thinker before and since, questioned—or in Voltaire’s case, mocked.)

God told Moses, “
Shtok
, keep quiet.
Kakh ala bemakhshava lefanai
, this is how I see things.” In another version of the same story, God replied to Moses, “Silence! This is how it is in the highest thought.”

Rabbi Akiva taught a curious solution to the ever-galling problem that while many good people and their children suffer enormously, many louses and their children prosper and thrive in the pink of health. God punishes the good, he proposed, in this short life, for their few sins, and rewards them eternally in the world to come. Similarly, God rewards the evil-doers in this short life for their few good deeds, and punishes them eternally in the world to come. I do not know how that sat with people. It is, like every ingenious, Godfearing explanation of natural calamity, harsh all around.

 N O W
      
       Is it not late? A late time to be living? Are not our generations the crucial ones? For we have changed the world. Are not our heightened times the important ones? For we have nuclear bombs. Are we not especially significant because our century is?—our century and its unique Holocaust, its refugee populations, its serial totalitarian exterminations; our century and its antibiotics, silicon chips, men on the moon, and spliced genes? No, we are not and it is not. These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other. Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it? Though perhaps we are the last generation—now
there’s
a comfort. Take the bomb threat away and what are we? Ordinary
beads on a never-ending string. Our time is a routine twist of an improbable yarn.

We have no chance of being here when the sun burns out. There must be something heroic about our time, something that lifts it above all those other times. Plague? Funny weather? Dire things are happening. In fact, we are witnessing a mass extinction of animals: According to Oxford’s Robert M. May, most of the birds and mammals we know will be gone in four hundred years. But there have been five other such mass extinctions, scores of millions of years apart. People have made great strides toward obliterating other people, too, but that has been the human effort all along, and our cohort has only broadened the means, as have people in every century. Why are we watching the news, reading the news, keeping up with the news? Only to enforce our fancy—probably a necessary lie—that these are crucial times, and we are in on them. Newly revealed, and we are in the know: crazy people, bunches of them. New diseases, shifts in power, floods! Can the news from dynastic Egypt have been any different?

A hundred years ago, Americans saw frenzy consuming their times, and felt the whole show could not go on much longer. Those people had seen electricity come and buffalo go. They had settled the country from shore to shore, run telegraph wires across the sea, and built spanning railroads
that shortened the overland trail journey from five months to five days. America had surpassed England in the production of steel. Surely theirs were apocalyptic days. Rushed time and distance were converging on a vanishing point before their eyes. They could, by their own accounts, scarcely bear their own self-consciousness. Now they seem innocent; they sang “A Bicycle Built for Two” and endured their times’ moral and natural evils. Since those evils no longer threaten us close to home—neither slavery, civil war, nor bacterial infections—they do not, of course, seem so vividly terrible as our own evils.

The closer we grow to death, the more closely we follow the news. Year after year, without ever reckoning the hours I wasted last week or last year, I read the morning paper. I buy mass psychotherapy in the form of the lie that this is a banner year. Or is it, God save us from crazies, aromatherapy? I smell the rat, but cannot walk away.

It is life’s noise—the noise of the news—that sings “It’s a Small World After All” again and again to lull you and cover the silence while your love boat slips off into the dark.

The blue light of television flickers on the cave wall. If the fellow crawls out of the cave, what does he see? Not the sun itself, but night, and the two thousand visible stars. Once, I tried to converse with him, the fellow who crawled out of his blue-lit cave to the real world. He had looked into this matter
of God. He had to shout to make himself heard: “How do you stand the wind out here?”

I don’t. Not for long. I drive a schoolkids’ car pool. I shouted back, “I don’t! I read
Consumer Reports
every month!” It seemed unlikely that he heard. The wind blew into his face. He turned and faced the lee. I do not know how long he stayed out. A little at a time does for me—a little every day.

B I R T H
      
      
Memoirs of a Cape Breton Doctor
describes, among many more dramatic incidents, the delivery of a transverse-presenting baby. “I looked after the baby…. I think I had the most worry because I had to use artificial respiration for a long time. I didn’t time how long I was using mouth-to-mouth breathing, but I remember thinking during the last several minutes that it was hopeless. But I persisted, and I was finally rewarded when Anna MacRae of Middle River, Victoria County, came to life.” She came to life. There was a blue baby-shaped bunch of cells between the two hands of Dr. C. Lamont MacMillan, and then there was a person who had a name and a birthday, like the rest of us. Genetically she bore precisely one of the 8.4 million possible
mixes of her mother’s and father’s genes, like the rest of us. On December 1, 1931, Anna MacRae came to life. How many centuries would you have to live before this, and thousands of incidents like it every day, ceased to astound you?

Now it is a city hospital on a Monday morning. This is the obstetrical ward. The doctors and nurses wear scrubs of red, blue, or green, and white running shoes. They are, according to the tags clipped to their pockets, obstetricians, gynecologists, pediatricians, pediatric nurse practitioners, and pediatric RNs. They consult one another on the hoof. They carry clipboards and vanish down corridors. They push numbered buttons on wall plaques, and doors open.