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Authors: Jennifer Traig

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BOOK: Devil in the Details
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Christians may have the slogans, the support groups, and the
brimstone, but Jews have an endless supply of minute laws. They
have the devil; we have the details. Scrupulous Christians have
only the Bible for crazy source material. Jews have the Talmud, the
Shulchan Aruch
, the Code of Ethics, and a host of other
texts, all chock-full of obsessive minutiae legislating matters as
esoteric as the cleanliness of hairnets. There are 613
commandments, which is enough to keep even the most industrious
compulsive busy all day long. Every movement and moment is
regulated, from the morning Modeh Ani prayer to the bedtime Shema.
The order in which you put on your shoes, the order in which you
tie them, the way in which you wash and dress and eat and speak –
all these things are prescribed in exacting detail. Almost every
activity requires a blessing before and after. There’s even a
blessing for using the bathroom, which, considering the binding
capacities of traditional Jewish cuisine, is totally
understandable.

It’s almost too much, an embarrassment of riches for the
compulsive practitioner. As a result, most scrupulous Jews tend to
overlook, even violate, the bulk of the laws while observing one or
two with excruciating care. Compulsions tend to come before
commandments. I could violate three or four commandments in one
fell swoop. I was happy to lie to my dishonored parents while
breaking the Sabbath, as long as it was in the service of getting
my hands ritually clean.

The great thing about having so many laws was that you could
pick and choose, and move on to the next when the last lost its
magic. I tore through scores. When the agricultural laws lost their
luster I turned to the laws proscribing the mixing of kinds: meat
and milk, linen and wool, oxen and asses, and, in my
interpretation, diet and regular. Next came the Levitical
regulations regarding bodily fluids. Here I thought I’d truly found
my metier, but this, too, grew old, and I moved on to the Temple
construction laws. At some point I became absolutely convinced I
needed to learn all the rules regarding the ephod, the temple
vestment. What if the Messiah came and I needed to sew an ephod?
What if I ended up on the Urim and Thumim committee? I had to know
the regulations. No one wants to be the jerk who messes up the
Messianic Age. No one wants to be the idiot who gets us all kicked
out of Eden again.

Because one’s immortal soul – Jewish or Christian – is on the
line, scrupulosity can be one of the hardest forms of OCD to treat.
The therapy and pharmaceuticals that can fix other
obsessive-compulsive disorders often aren’t enough; clergy has to
be brought in, too. Oddly, religion is often what helps the
sufferer get over it. There are numerous accounts of terribly
afflicted people whose scrupulosity disappeared as soon as they
entered a religious order. Well, no surprise. If faith in a higher
power can get people to stop doing really, really fun things like
cocaine and Keno, it can certainly get them to stop sterilizing can
openers.

Faith was almost all I had. At the time, the good drugs and
really effective therapeutic protocols hadn’t been invented yet. We
didn’t have anything. We didn’t even have a diagnosis. But we had
rabbis, and so it was that I ended up in a series of synagogue
offices, whimpering while my parents reeled off the list of my most
recent peccadilloes.

I had expected the rabbis to be impressed with my piety, to
collude with me, to tell my parents they were lucky to have such a
devout child. Instead they shook their heads and sighed and gently
suggested I spend more time with my friends.

This, of course, was exactly what they were supposed to do.
Though Jewish literature doesn’t speak of scrupulosity, and these
rabbis didn’t either, they clearly knew what I had and what to do.
They said, we’ve learned about this. They said we’ve seen this
before. In the end their response was the same as the Church’s, the
same as the APA’s, the same as my mother’s: to insist, in as
reassuring a tone as possible, that I cut the crap.

A standard sermon joke: A synagogue is plagued with mice. The
congregation hires exterminator after exterminator, to no avail.
The mice keep coming back. Finally the rabbi has an idea. He stays
up all night sewing tiny yarmulkes and prayer shawls. He places
some cheese on the bimah, and when the mice come to eat it, he bar
mitzvahs them. They are never seen in synagogue again.

The process was more or less the same for me. There was some
chanting; some words from the rabbi; several years of behavior
modification, relapses, therapy, and pharmaceuticals; and then,
like the bar mitzvahed mice, my scrupulosity went away. Poof, like
magic.

INTERSTITIAL

 

MUSICAL CHAIRS: A GAME

Everyone loves party games, but the traditional ones
are dances with the devil. Piñatas, pin the tail on the donkey –
you’re just asking for trouble. Why risk an eye-goring, a
concussion, or eternal damnation when you can have just as much fun
with this engaging activity? It’s guaranteed safe and guaranteed
fun. Best of all, you can play alone. The prize: your physical and
spiritual security!

NUMBER OF PLAYERS: 1

OBJECT: Find someplace to sit! With all the chairs in
this house, it should be easy, but…

RULES:

  1. Players may not sit in the white chair, the comfortable one
    across from the TV. Sure, white is the color of purity and
    holiness, and if the chair were still actually white this might
    repel sin, but sadly, that’s not the case. The favorite chair of
    the pets and the site of their frequent self-administered genital
    baths, it has become gray, shredded, and contaminated beyond
    repair. Move on!
  2. Players may not sit on either the leather couch or the
    loveseat. The loveseat is forbidden for the name alone.
    Loveseat
    . This is just asking for it. The couch isn’t much
    better. First of all, it’s leather, and hence steeped in meat and
    impurity and death. You
    might
    be able to sit on it if you
    hadn’t just consumed dairy, but you have, and you’ve got bigger
    problems than that, anyway. You’re pretty sure the couch was
    purchased on Shabbat. Finally, your sister and her friends like to
    sit there, and let’s be frank: a couple of them are suspected
    dischargers. That couch is contaminated, all right. Just forget
    about it.
  3. Players may not sit on the Eames recliner. It is your father’s
    favorite chair and to sit there would be disrespectful.
    Furthermore, it is leather (see Rule 2).
  4. Players may not sit on the tweed couch. True, it rarely gets
    used and is therefore less likely to be contaminated. But it’s a
    pullout. It’s a pullout, a
    bed
    , and it seems possible that
    overnight guests may have had sex on it. Keep moving.
  5. Players may not sit on any of the beds, because they are
    beds.
  6. Players may not sit on any of the armchairs, because who knows
    what they’re stuffed with.
  7. Players may not sit on either the kitchen or dining room
    chairs. Food gets dropped on the upholstery all the time. To sit on
    these chairs is to sit on ham.
  8. Players may not sit on any of the desk chairs, because they
    used to be kitchen chairs.
  9. Players may not sit on the floor, because this prompts your
    father to yell, “This isn’t Morocco, and in this house we sit on
    chairs, dammit.” To sit on the floor is to disrespect your parents.
    Furthermore, as your father points out, “If you’re worried about
    impurity, the floor is the last place you should be sitting. As far
    as the pets are concerned, the floor is just one big shag-pile
    toilet.”
  10. Players may not sit on any of the toilets. This goes without
    saying. Don’t think about toilets. Don’t think about toilets. Don’t
    think about toilets. Oh, now you’re going to have to go wash. Game
    over.


Devil in the Details

H
alf-
B
reed

I
first learned I was
Jewish from the minister’s daughter who lived across the street. At
five, she was a year older than I was and had proved to be a
reliable source in the past, teaching me both the F-word and its
definition. I knew she was telling me the truth. I just didn’t know
what it meant. Because she said “You’re
a Jewish
” in the
same tone that she’d told me “You’re a
fuck-you
” a week
earlier, I gathered it was something vaguely bad, but that was all
I had to go on.

As I had the previous week, I trotted home and repeated what I’d
just heard to my mother. “I swear, I’ve just about had it with that
girl,” my mother sighed, jabbing a trowel into a bed of marigolds.
“But yes. You’re Jewish.”

I waited for some elaboration.

“You want to know what that means? It means that you’ll never be
good at sports and that you’ll score pretty well on a test called
the SAT. It means you’ll always choose Tab over beer. It also means
that we probably shouldn’t be feeding you pork and teaching you
Christmas carols, but what can you do?”

She tousled my hair and returned to her marigolds. “Don’t look
so worried. Nothing’s going to change. Not until we have to start
waxing that Eastern European mustache.” She smiled optimistically.
“Let’s just hope you got my genes in that department.”

My mother went on to explain that, in fact, the minister’s
daughter was only half right. I was half Jewish. Like the previous
week’s F-word discussion, this explanation began with a man and a
woman falling in love and involved the awkward placement of body
parts and other things that I wouldn’t understand until I was much,
much older. My Catholic RN mother and Jewish MD father had been
working at San Francisco General Hospital. In between extracting
baby-food jars and produce from the rectums of the sexual
revolution’s soldiers, they had managed to meet and eventually
marry. It was a romantic beginning, and every time they hear a
story about a foreign object lodged in someone’s anus, I imagine
they share a secret smile.

My parents have, in fact, been married three times, which is a
lot for people who’ve never had their own TV series. The first
ceremony was spare and secular, a formality, just the two of them
and a judge. The second one, performed a week later, was trickier.
At the time, my father was stationed overseas in the air force.
It’s difficult enough to find a priest and a rabbi willing to
perform a joint interfaith ceremony in America; in Okinawa, in
1968, it was all but impossible. The priest dropped out when my
father refused to sign a document promising any male offspring
would be left uncircumcised. For my father, not only a Jew but a
surgeon, this was unthinkable. Of course he would lop off the
foreskin, and his future children would be lucky if he stopped
there. He was always taking scalpels to us, removing moles and skin
tags and infected toenails. This is how he showed us he loved us.
“Just be happy he’s not a gastroenterologist,” my mother says
darkly, arching her brows.

With the priest out of the picture, my parents turned their
attentions to the rabbi. Initially he refused. My father doesn’t
remember what changed his mind; my mother insists it was her charm.
Whatever it was, it worked. Thus, wedding number two. This time
there were more people – twelve – and a fish platter. Following the
ceremony, they sent out an announcement, a black-and-white photo of
the two of them looking for all the world like a pair of lost Mod
Squad members. There’s my father in a three-piece suit, holding an
umbrella over my mother, barefoot in a caftan and granny glasses.
The caption deadpanned, “On August 30, 1968, Alain Traig and Judith
Conroy were married. Wahoo.”

Wahoo. And thus they settled into a comfortable life off-base in
the bungalow they shared with a host of geckos and cockroaches.
They spent their days treating GIs for the urogenital souvenirs
they acquired on shore leave, their nights toasting their union
over cocktails and Stan Getz. The evenings were balmy, and as the
sun went down, the house filled with the scent of “night soil,” an
Okinawan phenomenon caused by the locals’ habit of defecating in
the fields.

If my parents had come from two different worlds, they were now
in a third so different it made their own religious differences
seem negligible. How to communicate with their lunatic Japanese
gardener? Left to his own devices he urinated on the lawn and
filled the flower bed with wilting stems cut from the neighbor’s
yard. The only English he knew was “Habu snake!” a phrase he hissed
endlessly, jabbing two fingers in the air in a gesture meant to
ward the creature off. It was a useful vocabulary but a very
limited one, and my mother’s pleas to stop watering the grass with
his own hose went uncomprehended.

Still, their Okinawan neighbors tried to make them feel at home.
Plenty of Americans had passed through before, and the locals had
become quite familiar with American customs. On October 31 swarms
of kids showed up to pound on the door. “American Halloween,” they
said. “You give us candy now.” Because their previous American
visitors had also taught them the adage “You all look alike,” they
kept this up for a couple hours, figuring my parents couldn’t tell
one group of twenty kids from the next. By the time my parents got
wise my mother was scraping the last butterscotch from the bottom
of her purse. My parents shut off the lights and spent the rest of
the night hiding in the bedroom, their cigarette embers glowing
orange as their ice cubes melted in the humid fall air.

It was a nice life, a tropical calm before the typhoon of family
life. They joined the photography club. They shopped for cheap
hi-fi equipment and the pirated records that would form the sound
track of my childhood, the jacket covers with their mangled English
leading me to believe, until I was ten, that the Breatles’ greatest
album was
Sergeant Peppep’s Loney Heats Cub Banb
. On
Saturday nights my father donned a ridiculous government-issue
white tuxedo that made him look like Cesar Romero and squired my
mother to cocktail parties on base. When his duty was up, he
promptly threw the suit in the trash, and my parents’ last view of
Okinawa, as they drove to the airport, was of their garbageman in
tie and tails.

BOOK: Devil in the Details
13.76Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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