A pagan and an atheist on religion re: Klinghoffer

Those of you who know me know the depths of my piety. So rigorous is my observance of the laws of Judaism that I constantly search for a six-hundred-fourteenth commandment to obey. Until recently, no luck. So it might come as a surprise that four times a year, around my oval table, I entertain two old friends, Paulie (“Poopidingus”) Pearlman, and Artie (“the Dodger”) Alston. Poopidingus is a practicing pagan; Artie, a devout atheist. This despite the fact that both were born to Jewish mothers; I attended their bar mitzvahs.

Over the years we've worked out a pattern. I say kiddish over the wine, Paulie the motzi, and Artie leads birkat. In unison, looking at our respective wives we stutter along through the interminable list of their virtues cited alphabetically in the Eishet Chayil. Why a pagan and an atheist would engage in these Jewish rituals I'm not sure. I, for instance don't sacrifice goats in Poopidingus's backyard. Just to make things kosher in their eyes we end the evening by singing the “Internationale,” for Artie, and “Diana” for Paulie (“I'm so young and you're so old/This, my darling I've been told/I don't care just what they say/'Cause forever I will pray/You and I will be as free/As the birds up in the trees/Oh, please, stay by me, Diana”) which is the closest to a pagan hymn he can find in English.

But this time Paulie arrived madder than Zeus with a toothache. “Did you see Klinghoffer in the April 20th Forward?” As we hadn't, he pulled out his copy and showed it to us. “It's titled 'Defend your Faith when it's Blasphemed.' My goddess (remind me to hit you up for another chai—we're having a building campaign to reconstruct Temple Beth Artemis which burned down a few years ago). Remember the Danish cartoon riots? It's headlines like Klinghoffer's that are the feces that launched a thousand Shiites.

“What is his problem?” he continued, his agitation mounting. “I don't get upset when people deny the existence of Zeus or Hera; Klinghoffer's the atheist to Christians who believe in the divinity of Jesus and the Holy Trinity. He's mad because Richard Dawkins says that the God of the Hebrew bible is 'arguably the most unpleasant character in fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully' doesn't make it true. But Klinghoffer's outrage doesn't make it false, either.” He was just getting warmed up. “I was at a couple of friends' daughter's bat mitzvahs recently and read of the death of Aaron's sons and of the death of the poor chap who was trying to prevent your holy arc from falling to the ground and smashing to smithereens. You do seem to have an arbitrary god there. Homer, at least, gives us the occasional reason for the displeasure of the gods. Your god just kills somebody and then, apparently, demands silence as a response. Some god!”

Artie chimed in. “Have you guys seen reviews of Hitchens's 'God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything'? I can't wait to read Klinghoffer on that.” Skimming the article, he continued: “I see here that he also objects to universities teaching that Tanach is just a collection of stories stitched together, and that the Zohar is not a second century book of mysticism but a 13th century hoax! Can you imagine? A religious hoax? Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism, whom he slams, once defended his academic endeavors by saying the “Nonsense is nonsense, but the study of nonsense is scholarship!” I've always loved that line. That the sun revolves around the earth, that'll be Klinghoffer's next claim.”

Sadly, we lamented the decline of the Age of the Enlightenment. It had a good run while it lasted, but the fundamentalists are back in force—Muslims in their madrass schools, Christians at Liberty University, and Klinghoffer at the Forward. “Religion's all made up by man,” said Poopidingus; “still, it's an occasionally amusing story, if you don't take it seriously,” chimed in Artie. Sighing, Paulie in his “Zeus Lives!” tee-shirt, Artie sporting his “Vote Atheist” button, peered deeply into the depths of their Manischewitz Concord Grape wine and wondered where humanity had gone wrong. I, on the other had, had discovered my six-hundred-fourteenth mitzvah! To comfort rationalists as the darkness descends.