A good laugh does wonders for our souls and if that good laugh comes to
me as a result of another man's fanatically religious and obviously
painful upbringing, well then, so be it.
Reading Foreskin's Lament by Shalom Auslander is nothing short of a crash course in fanaticism and its undesirable affects on the brain. Speaking of the brain, I've racked mine trying to write something that does this memoir justice and the truth is, it's not going to happen. A girl can't do justice to a book so wonderfully well written and easy to read, yet so far from her realm of understanding.
It is safe to say that fanaticism is something I was never taught, religiously or otherwise, and for that I am thankful.
I grew up eating bacon (traif, I now know) on Sunday mornings without the thought that it was the delicious result of a slaughtered pig ever crossing my mind. My grandmother took me to church on occasion, so long as I wore tights and chewed a piece of Trident to keep quiet until it was time to be released for the children's service. I didn't mind going because there were always doughnuts and orange juice afterward.
Not to mention the fact
that my mother would give me a one-dollar bill for the offering plate, which I stole each time and used to buy candy at the pharmacy downtown.
I've
never considered whether or not my parents are religious people. I
suppose I always just assumed as much. After all, my Dad kept a sonogram
photo of his and my mother's first baby, who didn't live, tucked in the
pages of a massive Bible in his desk drawer. He told me one time that an
image in the sonogram looked to him like the hand of God and so, I
assumed that God was one he firmly believed in. Because my mother is married to the man, I went ahead and assumed she believed, too.
The
thought that, "I was sick. I was diseased. I was a criminal. I was a
Sodomite, an Amorite, a Hittite, a Sinite, a Givite. I was Cain. I was
Esau. I was Lot's wife," has never crossed my mind. In
fact, I'm not even sure what 80% of those words mean and the degree to
which I'm not afraid of God being angry with me for Slim Jim consumption
is likely as foreign to Mr. Auslander as those words are to me.
Throughout each chapter of Foreskin's Lament we get a glimpse of the ways Shalom Auslander's parents' belief in and practice of Judaism affected not only his mind as a child but, more interestingly, the ways those beliefs and practices are unshakable to him as an adult.
The man has clearly mastered two things in his life: fearing God and writing about it.
I can imagine the frustration that must come along with a constant internal dialogue, but what I cannot imagine, for the love of all that is holy, is the fear. Fear of eating Cheetos, fear of loved ones dying, fear of a parent, fear of the act of circumcision. Fear of publishing stories about fear.
Auslander writes about a walk in the woods with his dogs and his wife, Orli, as she explains to him that the story of the old lady and the foreskin "sounds like bullshit." He calls for the dogs, worried that someone may be getting an early jump on hunting season, noting that without their orange safety vests they look like deer and writes, "If I could get one of those vests to protect us from God, I wouldn't even be thinking of circumcising our son."I hate to say that I'm quite happy, for one, that orange God safety vests don't exist because if they did, my favorite book wouldn't.
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