Philip Davis is a professor of English literature at Liverpool University, author of Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life, and editor of The Reader. Since it is Jewish Heritage Month here in the United States we asked him to reflect on his own Jewish heritage. Below we learn about serious jokes.
More than forty years ago, Mr Zold was the shamas – the Jewish church warden, as it were – of the Orthodox Synagogue to be found in Shakespeare Street, Nottingham.
As a boy I was more interested in Shakespeare than in Judaism, but the address was only part of the incongruities of assimilation: just along the road, in a not dissimilar white-stone building, was the local YMCA. My father was an orthodox Jew, a Yeshiva-educated boy from Hackney in London, who as the years went on became more and more disillusioned with orthodoxy. He hated the thought that the more money you paid, the better your seat in the synagogue – meaning, not some superior cushioning (he could have put up with that), but a place closer to the Ark of the Covenant and by implication to the Lord Himself. My father also disliked the new Rabbi. I remember one Day of Atonement – Yom Kippur, which follows hard upon Rosh Hasshanah, the Jewish New Year – when towards mid-afternoon, my father went upstairs to the separate ladies gallery above us males, to see how my mother was doing during the fasting. That was his custom as a husband every year around three o’clock; it was like a religious ritual. Only as he did so, the ‘new Rabbi’ (meaning he had probably been in post for five years by now) made a loud announcement in English that the men were not allowed to visit their wives upstairs – which, in point of orthodoxy, was correct. My father, however, had his own laws, and even as Rabbi Posen renewed his prohibition from the dais, the bimah, there was my father visibly leaning over the rail of the ladies gallery in profiled assertion of his greater loyalty. Defiantly, he expected to be seen in his silent protest, and I sitting alone downstairs awaiting his return was (I now recall with some surprise) not in the least embarrassed but delightedly proud. I knew even then that this was the minority within the minority, the righteous law-breaker, the stiff-necked hook-nosed Jew of the prophets recalling spirit against letter.
Zold, nonetheless, was the only one of the establishment whom my father respected. He was, like us, learned but neglected, lower in the formal hierarchy, higher in the hidden spirit. It was not that same Yom Kippur – the all-day service without all-day breakfast – but another a year or so later, I think, when one hot afternoon Old Man Zold suddenly became an unlikely Moses, descending from Mount Sinai with the stone tablets of the Commandments, only to find his people forgetting him (and Him) in worship of a Golden Calf.
It happened some time after the most sacred part of the service when the Jews become mindful that this is indeed the period in which their Lord carefully writes down their names in the Book of Life for the year to come. Or not:
On Rosh Hashanah it is inscribed,
And on Yom Kippur it is sealed,
How many shall pass away and how many shall be born,
Who shall live and who shall die,
Who shall reach the end of his days and who shall not,
Who shall perish by water and who by fire,
Who by sword and who by wild beast,
Who by famine and who by thirst,
Who by earthquake and who by pl