Swish (24 page)

He was a fucking Jew for Jesus.

It can be difficult for gentiles to understand why Jews tend to loathe the Jews for Jesus more than we loathe anything else upon the earth, including neo-Nazis and going camping.

But imagine that you’re one of the Chosen People, and that your identity is based on the idea that you have a unique relationship with God. For thousands of years your people has been persecuted for being different; you could have changed that at any point by accepting Jesus, but you didn’t, because it would have meant giving up that relationship with God, and if inquisitions and pogroms and genocide have been the price you’ve had to pay, then so be it.

Now imagine that along come these folks who say, We get the unique relationship with God
but we also get to be just like everybody else
! We can enjoy the cachet of being different and relax in the comfort of the majority at the same time! We get to have our cake and eat it too! We get to be the Chosen People
and not pay for it
!

What are you going to think? You’re going to think that it’s a cheat, an outrage, an insult to human decency and to every Jew who has ever been slaughtered for refusing to bow to a graven image.

So when David revealed himself to me as a Jew for Jesus, my first impulse was to spit in his face. “I don’t understand that,” I said finally, and realized immediately how rude it sounded. “I mean, can you explain that to me?” Hardly better. “I just mean…not
make me understand
but
talk to me more about it.
”
Please, God,
I prayed,
help me not commit murder here in the LifeWay Ridgecrest cafeteria.

“The short answer,” he said, “is that I was absolutely pierced in the heart by Christian friends who convinced me.”
Some friends,
I thought. “The long answer is that I was just unfulfilled by Judaism. I just felt something was missing. And as I started to look at Christianity, I felt like, well, okay, either Jesus was a liar and a lunatic, or he was the real thing. And too many people believe in him for him to have been a liar and a lunatic. So I realized he had to be real.”

“Can I ask you a question?” I said. “Do you consider yourself Jewish—”

“Yes.”

I gritted my teeth at the interruption. “—or Christian?”

“Yes.” I was a hair’s breadth away from slapping him. “I’m still one of the Chosen People. My Christian friends love that I’m a Jew who has come to the faith. I’m just glad I’m not bound for eternal hell.”

I wasn’t going to touch that one. “All right,” I said. “Here’s another question. People here keep saying things like ‘I trust God’s plan for me’ and ‘God supplies all my needs.’” David nodded. “So take Darfur, where half a million people have been massacred by the Janjaweed militia. Has God been supplying their needs? And if not, why not?”

This is what drives me crazy whenever I hear people say things like, “Ask the universe for what you want, and you’ll get it,” why I fucking
hated
that Paulo Coelho book
The Alchemist
that everybody was reading in the late nineties. Whenever I saw the book in anybody’s hands on the subway I always wanted to say, “So the reason a million Tutsis were just slaughtered in Rwanda is that
they didn’t ask the universe not to kill them
?”

It was obvious as soon as David opened his mouth that he had never thought about such a question before. He kept talking and talking about how our only real need is to be in line with God’s will and He’s a jealous God and blah blah blah blah blah and I stopped listening and started toying with my spoon, wishing I could plunge it into his eye sockets and pop out his eyes. What I really wanted was to take an ancient Egyptian brain hook (a mummification tool), shove it up his nose, and yank his brains out through his nostrils, but all I had was the spoon.

Why is it,
the small part of me not engaged in the contemplation of violence wondered,
that I can listen to the ex-gays talk about the sin of homosexuality in the strongest possible language and not bat an eyelash, but that every word this man says about God makes me wish I had a butcher knife with me?
Then the words “butcher knife” opened up a new vista of fantasy and I was off again.

When David finally stopped talking, I began gathering my things to leave, but he wasn’t done yet. “Do you mind if I pray?” he asked. I minded very much, but I had no idea how to say so. “O Father God,” David said, and I knew I was doomed. “Thank You for Joel, thank You for his open mind and his open heart.” I hated him so viciously I couldn’t even bring myself to feel bad that he believed my mind and heart were open. “From our conversations I understand he wants to see You and wants to find You. So please reveal Yourself to him as You desire, and if I’ve said anything that isn’t from You, please wipe it from his memory.”

Unfortunately this did not happen. I remember every excruciating detail.

When I got back to my room I called Mike and told him I had met an ex-gay Jew for Jesus, to which Mike replied, “Well,
he’s
a joiner.”

Every single person I met at the Exodus conference
loved
that I was a Jew. This was not because they believed, as many Jews fear evangelical Christians do, that the Jews’ return to Israel will hasten the coming of the Antichrist and the end times. “I wish I could know the love Jesus has for you,” said one woman I met. “You’re one of the Chosen People!” She said this in the same awestruck tone of voice in which I might address somebody who had made it through week eight of
America’s Next Top Model
.

The thing that seemed most difficult to grasp for a number of the Exodus delegates—many of whom, as far as I could tell, had never met a Jewish person before—was the idea that we don’t really pay attention to heaven or hell. “I mean, I think we might have an afterlife of some kind,” I said one evening in conversation with very very handsome Matt, hot Jon’s calendar-worthy friend from the First-Timers’ Oasis, “but nobody ever talks about it.” Upon my return to New York I did some research and discovered that we do in fact have hell, but it only lasts for a year, and then everybody goes to heaven.

“Then what’s the point of obeying the Torah?” asked very very handsome Matt, pronouncing “Torah” very carefully, as if he feared I would report him to the Anti-Defamation League if he got it wrong.

“The point,” I said, “is to be a good person here and now, not because you hope you’ll be rewarded for it later on but because it’s what you’re supposed to do.”

“Well, that doesn’t make any sense to me,” said very very handsome Matt. “If we didn’t have an afterlife to worry about, I sure wouldn’t be
here.
I’d be having group sex every night.”

For the record, modern Jewish attitudes toward homosexuality differ as much as modern Christian attitudes. There are fundamentalist Israelis who have stabbed marchers in the Jerusalem Pride parade; there is a GLBT synagogue in Manhattan whose rabbi has been named (by three different national publications) one of America’s top fifty Jewish leaders. When it comes to consistency, being the People of the Book doesn’t give us any advantage over the goyim.

An old couple gave the testimony at the session after my dinner with David; they talked about their son Sean, who had rejected them after going into the lifestyle. “But we kept praying,” said the mother, “and eventually he started to come around. He broke up with his lover, who was very dependent and needy. We got Sean to a therapist who had a good reputation for helping people change. But the night after he saw her for the first time, he was murdered by his ex-lover. The therapist called us the next day—she hadn’t seen the morning paper—to say she thought Sean was ready to roll up his sleeves and get to work.”

I shifted back and forth in my pew, unable to sit still. Every aspect of this story appalled me. The parents’ misplaced hope, the homicidal lover, Sean’s misplaced hope, the therapist’s discussing her client with his family.

The father took over the narrative. “I was so angry at Sean,” he said. “I was angry at all homosexuals. I said awful, terrible, hurtful things. And I pray every day for forgiveness for that.” Someone from the audience shouted “You are forgiven!” and I was filled with a white-hot rage.

This is one element of Judaism on which I like to think I am crystal clear. You have to work
hard
to be forgiven. Every year on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, Jews say the Kol Nidrei, asking God to pardon the sins we will commit against Him during the coming year. This prayer was written in Spain during the Inquisition, when the three choices open to Jews were to accept Jesus, to leave the country, or to burn. Those who feigned conversion to Christianity knew they would probably have to spend a lot of time eating pork or worshipping three gods or working on the Sabbath and decided to ask God to forgive these trespasses ahead of time in one fell swoop, annually.

But the Kol Nidrei applies only to sins we commit against God. To be forgiven for sins we commit against one another, we must follow a rigorous multistep process. Different descriptions offer different minutiae, but in the end you get something like this: First, after admitting that we have sinned, we have to feel remorse and resolve not to commit the sin again. Then we have to undo the damage we have done. And only then do we have the right to ask for forgiveness. If the person we wronged refuses to forgive us, then we have to go through the whole process over again, starting with admitting that we have sinned. And if the person we wronged refuses
again,
we have to do it all over again one more time. And if the answer is
still
no, then we’re forgiven anyway, because he’s being unreasonable. The only person who can forgive us is the person against whom we sinned; there can never be forgiveness from a third party. If the person we wronged is dead, we have to kneel at his grave and beg forgiveness in front of ten witnesses.

Forgiveness is
not easy
when you’re a Jew.

I know this because of a letter my father sent me one Yom Kippur, when I was twenty-two, about how badly he and my mother had reacted when I came out. “I have never asked you for forgiveness,” he wrote, after mentioning that he had just learned about the process of forgiveness in synagogue, “and I never could put my finger on why, except that I didn’t feel entitled to yet. While I have been racked with enough pain to feel that I have been working on step 1, I also know that what I did to you has not yet been undone, so my wrong has not been repaired.

“And, in failing you, I failed Mom. Instead of passively following her lead and shrinking from arguing with her, I should have been struggling with her for your sake and for her sake, to help her do the right thing which I knew she could not do by herself.

“Perhaps the way I make it right to Mom is to help do what she can no longer do, which is to make it right to you—which is what I didn’t do before, when I could have prevented so much of your pain.”

I still have this letter; there are sections I can quote from memory. So when some bumpkin in the audience in Asheville called out, “You are forgiven!” I was consumed with a vast, unquenchable fire of hate. I hated them all: I hated the father, I hated the forgiver, I hated everyone in the room. I wanted to develop psychic powers and explode their heads. I wanted them all to burst into flames; I wanted them to die long, agonizing deaths full of suffering, starting right now. How
dared
they presume to forgive this man, how dared they rob that right from Sean or his spirit or his soul or whatever part of him hadn’t rotted with his flesh? And how dared they forgive so cheaply? They didn’t know what the man in front of them had said. They didn’t know what he had done. They didn’t know how his love or hatred or ignorance or understanding had shaped or misshaped his son or anyone else he knew. He felt remorse; that much was clear. But he had done nothing to make it right; instead, he had come here and applauded a thousand people for loathing themselves so much it made them sing. I didn’t care that he felt this
was
making it right. Where was Sean’s grave, that he might go to it and kneel down in front of ten witnesses and beg forgiveness for being grateful that at least his son didn’t die gay? I wanted it to be Yom Kippur right now, so he could beg forgiveness of God, for believing Him to be so small-minded He gives a damn about who loves whom on this speck of dust.