Shalom Auslander - Foreskins Lament

A Memoir

PICADOR

4. And the Lord said unto Moses,

This is the land I promised you,

but you shall not enter. Psych.

5. And Moses died.

D EUTERONOMY

Contents

W hen I was a child, my parents and teachers told me about a man who was very strong. They told me he could destroy the whole world. They told me he could lift mountains. They told me he could part the sea. It was important to keep the man happy. When we obeyed what the man had commanded, the man liked us. He liked us so much that he killed anyone who didnt like us. But when we didnt obey what he had commanded, he didnt like us. He hated us. Some days he hated us so much, he killed us; other days, he let other people kill us. We call these days holidays. On Purim, we remembered how the Persians tried to kill us. On Passover, we remembered how the Egyptians tried to kill us. On Chanukah, we remembered how the Greeks tried to kill us.

Blessed is He, we prayed.

As bad as these punishments could be, they were nothing compared to the punishments meted out to us by the man himself. Then there would be famines. Then there would be floods. Then there would be furious vengeance. Hitler might have killed the Jews, but this man drowned the world. This was the song we sang about him in kindergarten:

God is here,

God is there,

God is truly

everywhere!

Then snacks, and a fitful nap.

I was raised like a veal in the Orthodox Jewish town of Monsey, New York, where it was forbidden to eat veal together with dairy. Having eaten veal, one was forbidden to eat dairy for six hours; having eaten dairy, one was forbidden to eat veal for three hours. One was forbidden to eat pig forever, or at least until the Messiah arrived; it was then, Rabbi Napier had taught us in the fourth grade, that the wicked would be punished, the dead would be resurrected, and pigs would become kosher.

Yay! I said, high-fiving my best friend, Dov.

You should be so excited, said Rabbi Napier, peering with disgust over the top of his thick horn-rimmed glasses, on the Day of Gods Judgment.

The people of Monsey were terrified of God, and they taught me to be terrified of Him, toothey taught me about a woman named Sarah who would giggle, so He made her barren; about a man named Job who was sad and asked, Why?, so God came down to the Earth, grabbed Job by the collar, and howled, Who the fuck do you think you are?; about a man named Moses, who escaped from Egypt, and who roamed through the desert for forty years in search of a Promised Land, and whom God killed just before he reached itface-plant on the one-yard linebecause Moses had sinned, once, forty years earlier. His crime? Hitting a rock. And so, in early autumn, when the leaves choked, turned colors, and fell to their deaths, the people of Monsey gathered together in synagogues across the town and wondered, aloud and in unison, how God was going to kill them: Who will live and who will die, they prayed, who at his predestined time and who before his time, who by water and who by fire, who by sword, who by beast, who by famine, who by thirst, who by storm, who by plague, who by strangulation, and who by stoning.

Then lunch, and a fitful nap.

It is Monday morning, six weeks after my wife and I learned that she is pregnant with our first child, and I am stopped at a traffic light. The kid doesnt have a chance. Its a trick. I know this God; I know how He works. The baby will be miscarried, or die during childbirth, or my wife will die during childbirth, or theyll both die during childbirth, or neither of them will die and Ill think Im in the clear, and then on the drive home from the hospital, well collide head-on with a drunk driver and theyll both die later, my wife and child, in the emergency room just down the hall from the room where only minutes ago we stood so happy and alive and full of promise.

That would be so God.

The teachers from my youth are gone, the parents old and mostly estranged. The man they told me about, thoughhes still around. I cant shake him. I read Spinoza. I read Nietzsche. I read National Lampoon. Nothing helps. I live with Him every day, and behold, He is still angry, still vengeful, stilleternallypissed off.

Man plans, my parents said, and God laughs.

When you least expect it, my teachers warned, expect it.

And I do. All day long, a never-ending horror film festival plays in my mind, my own private Grand Guignol. There isnt an hour of the day that goes by without some gruesome, horrific imaginings of death, anguish, and torment. Walking down the street, shopping for groceries, filling the truck with gas; friends die, beloveds are murdered, pets are run over by delivery trucks and killed.

Up ahead, past the intersection where the road bends sharply to the right, cars slow, brake lights flashing as they disappear around the bend. An accident, I imagine, and I imagine driving by Shithead, I will criticize the driver, ought to know better than to speed around here... when I recognize the car. It is a black Nissan. That looks like Orlis... And then I see my wife behind the wheel, crushed, bloody, head back, tongue out. She is dead. I can bring myself to tears this way; if Im in a particularly self-loathing mood, I may, like a Reuters photographer, place a childs toy in her blood-soaked lap, or a colorfully gift-wrapped box on the dash above the very spot where her head had bashed it in.

ExteriorDaytimeLater. I am sitting on the guardrail, inconsolable.

Youre still young, says a police officer. Whole life ahead of you.

She was pregnant, I whisper.

Close-up on the face of the hardened police officer. He has seen it all. But this...

A tear rolls down his face.

Fin.

Our unborn baby is the newest star of my horror shows. Just six weeks now since conception and already its been deformed, deranged, diseased, miscarried, misdiagnosed, mistaken for a tumor and irradiated, sat on, bumped into, impaled during some ill-advised late-term sex, and overcooked when Orli fell asleep in a steaming bath.

Are you sure about this? I had asked her as she sank with a sigh into the tub. Seems a little hot.

Get out, she had said.

I dragged my finger through the steam that had formed on the shower glass.

You dont have to make it easy for Him, I said.

Get OUT.

When I was young, they told me that when I died and went to Heaven, the angels would take me into a vast museum full of paintings I had never before seen, paintings that would have been created by all the artistic sperms I had wasted in my life. Then the angels would take me into a huge library full of books I had never read, books that would have been written by all the prolific sperms I had wasted in my life. Then the angels would take me to a huge house of worship, filled with hundreds of thousand of Jews, praying and studying, Jews that would have been born if I hadnt killed them, wasted them, mopped them up with a dirty sock during the hideous failure of my despicable life (there are roughly 50 million sperms in every ejaculate; thats about nine Holocausts in every wank. I was just hitting puberty when they told me this, or puberty was just hitting me, and I was committing genocide, on average, three or four times a day). They told me that when I died and went to Heaven, I would be boiled alive in giant vats filled with all the semen I had wasted during my life. They told me that when I died and went to Heaven, all the souls of every sperm I wasted during my life would chase me for eternity through the firmament. You dont have to be ordained to play this gamego on, try it!all you need is terror, bloodlust, and a sense of gruesome, violent irony. Heres mine: I worry that God puts all the healthy, perfect, talented sperm in the early ejaculates of a mans lifethe mans someday reward for the control he has had over his revolting animusand that, as the years pass and he ejaculates again and again (and again and again and again), sperm quality plummets: by the time he is me, all thats left are the rejectsthe cross-eyed, the bucktoothed, the overbitten, the underbitten, the flippered of foot, the webbed of finger, the idiots, the lazy, the criminals, the morons, the yutzes, the putzes, the schmucks. That would be so God.