The Last Testament: A Memoir (23 page)

¹¹
Proverbs, which is full of pithy little zingers like, “A shekel saved is a shekel earned,” and “Rome will not be built in a day”;

¹²
Ecclesiastes, a harsh condemnation of vanity and falsehood that was
The Catcher in the Rye
of the 8th century B.C. Near East;

¹³
And the Song of Solomon, a love poem that is as blue as the Bible gets; which believe it or not is actually pretty blue.

¹⁴
“The joints of thy thighs are like jewels”; “thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies”; “thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins”; and that is just the material that made it into print.

¹⁵
For Solomon’s original version was far more explicit, and his analogies far more graphic:

¹⁶
“Thy hindquarters are curved like half-moons”; “Thy honeypot smells like blooming hibiscus”; “The way thou workest my balls . . . man, I love the way thou workest my balls.”

¹⁷
After he recited the unexpurgated version to me I said, “Solomon, thou well knowest we cannot publish that as written; it is pornography, and even the Bible has a minimum standard of decency.”

¹⁸
“But, L
ORD
,” he protested, “it is not pornography; it is
erotica.
Canst thou not grasp the difference?”

¹⁹
“No, Solomon, and it doth not—”

²⁰
“Pornography aimeth only at arousing the senses; but erotica employeth sexuality as a window into the soul.”

²¹
“Solomon, whatever it is, it—”

²²
“My work challenges the bourgeois sexual mores that have for too long treated our bodies as the ‘other’ rather than—”

²³
“Solomon, listen: I am the L
ORD
thy God, King of the Universe; and if thou dost not knock that thing down to PG-13 by next Shabbos, consider thyself without a distributor.”

CHAPTER 5

1
T
he 16 prophetic books of the Old Testament relate the lives and visions of Israel’s great men of prophecy, and are divided into two sections: the four major prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel; and the twelve minor ones, nearly all of whom were never swallowed by whales.

²
(The worst part of that experience for Jonah was not the three days in the beast’s belly, but being spat up back upon the shore, haggard and covered in whale vomit... right in front of his sunbathing ex-girlfriend.

³
Awkward!)

⁴
Officially, Abraham is considered a prophet; so is Moses, and so, later, would be Muhammad; but they were also warriors, and diplomats, and leaders; men who did not simply talketh the talk, but walkethed the walk.

⁵
But these 16 prophets were cut from a lesser tunic; for they were endowed only with the gift of foresight.

⁶
Now, it can be debated whether it is on balance a good or bad thing to be a prophet; but there can be no debate that it is an absolute bad thing to have to spend time with one.

⁷
For prophets are the most unpleasant people in all my Creation; the dourest, the voidest of mirth, and the uncouthest in social graces; self-righteous and self-absorbed, yet utterly un-self-aware in matters of grooming.

⁸
(Isaiah, especially; by the end, his beard was so matted with food it won Buffet of the Year honors from
Head Lice Monthly.
)

⁹
And their odiousness is in direct proportion to the strength of their prophecy; the keener their tongues, the keener the longing to chop them off; the deeper their vision, the deeper the desire to stick forks in their eyes.

¹⁰
It would be different if the content of their revelations were pleasant; but as thou hast no doubt noticed, a prophet’s vision of the future is seldom of the puppies-floating-down-from-the-sky-on-pillows variety.

¹¹
No, it is almost always grim; and further, it is almost always explained as the mete punishment for the people’s vice; and it has ever been the case that as an oratorical theme, “Ye are iniquitous, sinners!” is not much of a crowd-pleaser.

¹²
And so it was with my prophets: they feared their people were wandering off the path; and they shared with them gruesome images of the destruction of Jerusalem, and the collapse of the Temple; but the people reacted with mockery, and heeded them not, and drove headlong to their fate.

¹³
They remind me of thy driver’s-ed teachers: for they, too, fear their classes might wander off the path; thus they share filmstrips filled with gruesome images of the destruction of a minivan, and the collapse of lungs; but the classes react with mockery, and heed them not, and drive headlong into telephone poles.

¹⁴
Prophets still walk the earth: retail analysts, and sports handicappers, and science-fiction writers, and that secret panel that gets together every summer to determine what colors will be popular two years from now;

¹⁵
They are minor prophets: for they can see into the future, a little bit, on matters of slight import, sometimes.

¹⁶
But major prophets, too, still walk among ye; preaching their wisdom, berating your wickedness, expounding their dark visions, and bearing names like Jeremiah Q. Ecologist, and Ezekiel R. Paleoclimatologist, and Al Gore.

¹⁷
Their visions are absolutely correct; absolutely terrifying; and absolutely call for urgent action.

¹⁸
But will ye take it? Absolutely not.

¹⁹
What prophets value above all else, above patience, friendship, even deodorant, is the truth; and so they believe that all men are like them in this valuation;

²⁰
That the masses will eventually embrace the words of another great prophet, my son: “the truth shall make you free.”

²¹
But what they never seem to understand—and what the masses always do—is that my son in that quote was referring only to
convenient
truths.

²²
Inconvenient truths shall
not
set you free; to the contrary, by their very nature they tend to impose far more burdens and obligations upon thee, and thus, if anything, set you back.

²³
On the other hand, convenient truths—like “our current way of life is permanently sustainable”—are much more liberating for the soul.

²⁴
That
is the inconvenient truth, Al; and here is another one:

²⁵
Thou shouldst have campaigned another two hours in Florida.

CHAPTER 6

¹
L
ooking back over the millennia, if there is one question I have failed to answer more than any other, it is, “Why do bad things happen to good people?”

²
Often the question is phrased differently, like, “Why do bad things happen to
me
?” or “Why can’t bad things happen to
him
?” or “Are you kidding? My car got stolen while I was ladling chowder at the soup kitchen?!?”; but I understand.

³
Thou clamorest for earthly justice, a palpable correspondence between moral cause and effect; but only seldom is such justice realized.

⁴
This dilemma is at the heart of the Book of Job, which attempts to prove once and for all that I either work in mysterious ways, or do
not
work in very obvious ones.

⁵
The book is set, according to the very first words of its very first verse, “in the land of Uz.”

⁶
(Whenever I read that, I cannot help but sing a little ditty to myself:

⁷
“‘Ah ah ah! Ow ow ow! I wish that I never was!’ That’s what I made Job scream in pain in the terrible land of Uz.”)

⁸
Job was “perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil”; and as a result he had grown prosperous, with a wife, ten children, a big house, “7,000 sheep and goats, 3,000 camels, 1,000 oxen, and 500 female donkeys.”

⁹
Yea; he had the biggest soul—and, in the best sense, the shittiest soil—in the Near East.

¹⁰
A point of clarification: the initial discussion concerning Job was between my angel Michael and me; he was my adversary in an argument, and the Hebrew word for “the adversary” is “Satan.”

¹¹
This has caused much confusion over the millennia, so Michael has expressly asked me to tell thee that he is
not
the devil; and also, yet again, that words
do
hurt.

¹²
But it is true that one day, he and I were debating whether the righteousness of a man like Job sprang from inherent goodness, as I claimed, or enlightened self-interest, as he did.

¹³
Was his loyalty tied only to the bounty he had always enjoyed, and had come to see as an entitlement? Or was he so devoted that he would remain steadfast even in the face of unimaginable suffering?

¹⁴
In other words: was he a Yankees fan or a Cubs fan?

¹⁵
Michael asked for permission to afflict him and put him to the test, which I granted: so he slew Job’s animals, destroyed his house, killed all ten of his children, and covered him with boils.

¹⁶
Through all this Job did not turn against me; though it is fair to say he was in a bad mood.

¹⁷
Then his three friends came to visit, ostensibly to provide comfort; yet they repeatedly told him he must surely be guilty of some sin to have merited his punishment.

¹⁸
It is their conversation that occupies most of the Book of Job, and at times seems to transform its central question to, “Why do bad
friends
happen to good people?”

¹⁹
Zophar the Naamathite, especially; what an asshole.

CHAPTER 7

1
A
nd
still
Job did not turn against me; but now he began to demand of me an explanation; and this is when a fourth friend, Elihu, entered with a different argument:

2 That in seeking to apply his own ethical standard to God, Job was displaying arrogance; for as a mere mortal he could not usurp my moral authority, only humbly renounce any claim to it.