More Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Outstanding Stories of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction

^{BARRY N. MALZBERG} Leviticus: In the Ark

CONDITIONS ARE DIFFICULT and services are delayed. Conditions have been difficult for some time, services have been delayed more often than being prompt, but never has it weighed upon Leviticus as it does now. Part of this has to do with his own situation: cramped in the ark, Torahs jammed into his left ear and right kneecap, heavy talmudic bindings wedged uncomfortably under his buttocks, he is past the moments of quiet meditation that for so long have sustained him. Now he is in great pain, his body is shrieking for release; he has a vivid image of himself bursting from the ark, the doors sliding open, his arms outstretched, his beard flapping in the strange breezes of the synagogue as he cries denunciation. I can no longer bear this position. There must be some Yiddish equivalent for this. Very well, he will cry it in Yiddish.

No, he will do nothing of the sort. He mill remain within the ark, six by four, jammed amidst the holy writings. At times he is sure that he has spent several weeks within, at others, all sense of time eludes him; perhaps it has been only a matter of hours… well, make it a few days since he has been in here. It does not matter. A minute is as a century in the Eye of God, he remembers—or did it go the other way?—and vague murmurs that he can hear through the not fully soundproofed walls of his chamber inform him that the service is about to begin. In due course, just before the adoration begins, they will fling open the doors of the ark and he will be able to gaze upon them for a few moments, breathe the somewhat less dense air of the synagogue, endure past many moments of this sort because of his sudden, shuddering renewal of contact with the congregation, but, ah God!… it is difficult. Too much has been demanded of him; he is suffering deeply.

Leviticus turns within the limited confines of his position, tries to find a more comfortable point of accommodation. Soon the service will begin. After the ritual chants and prayers, after the sermon and the hymn, will come the adoration. At the adoration the opening of the ark. He will stretch. He will stand. He will stretch out a hand and greet them. He will cast light upon their eyes and upon the mountains: that they shall remember and do all his commandments and be holy unto him.

He wonders if his situation has made him megalomaniac.

Two weeks before, just at the point when Leviticus’ point of commitment to the ark loomed before him, he had appeared in the rabbi’s cubicle and made a plea for dispensation. “I am a sick man,” he had said, “I do not think that I will be able to stand the confinement. Also, and I must be quite honest with you, rabbi, I doubt my religious faith and commitment. I am not sure that I can function as that embodiment of ritual which placement in the ark symbolizes.” This was not quite true; at least, the issue of religious faith had not occurred to Leviticus in either way; he was not committed to the religion, not quite against it either, it did not matter enough… but he had gathered from particularly reliable reports going through the congregation that one of the best ways of getting out of the ark was to plead a lack of faith. Perhaps he had gotten it wrong. The rabbi looked at him for a long time, and finally, drawing his robes tightly around him, retreating to the wall, looked at Leviticus as if he were a repulsed object. “Then perhaps your stay in the ark will do you some good,” he had said; “it will enable you to find time for meditation and prayer. Also, religious belief has nothing to do with the role of the tenant. Does the wine in the goblet conceive of the nature of the sacrament it represents? In the same way, the tenant is merely the symbol.”

“I haven’t been feeling well,” Leviticus mumbled. “I’ve been having chest pains. I’ve been having seizures of doubt. Cramps in the lower back; I don’t think that I can—”

“Yes you can,” the rabbi said with a dreadful expression, “and yes you will,” and had sent Leviticus out into the cold and casting light of the settlement, beginning to come to terms with the realization that he could not, could not under any circumstances, escape the obligation thrust upon him. Perhaps he had been foolish to have thought that he could. Perhaps he should not have paid credence to the rumors. He returned to his cubicle in a foul temper, set the traps to privacy and sullenly put through the tape of the Union Prayer Book, Revised Edition: For the High Holy Days. If you really were going to have to do something like this, he guessed that a little bit of hard background wouldn’t hurt. But it made no sense. The writings simply made no sense. He shut off the tapes and for a long time gave no further thought to any of this, until the morning, when, in absolute disbelief, he found the elders in his unit, implacable in their costume, come to take him to the ark. Tallis and tefillim.

In the ark, Leviticus ponders his condition while the services go on outside. He has taken to self-pity during his confinement; he has a tendency to snivel a little. It is really not fair for him, a disbelieving man but one who has never made his disbelief a point of contention, to be thrown into such a position, kept there for such an extended period of time. Ritual is important, and he for one is not to say that the enactment of certain rote practices does not lend reassurance, may indeed be a metaphor for some kind of reality which he cannot apprehend… but is it right that all of this should be at his expense? He has never entered into disputation with the elders on their standards of belief; why should they force theirs upon him?

A huge volume of the Talmud jabs his buttocks, its cover a painful little concentrated point of pain, and cursing, Leviticus bolts from it, rams his head against the beam forming half of the ceiling of the ark, bends, reaches, seizes the volume, and with all his force hurls it three feet into the flat wall opposite. He has hoped for a really satisfying concussion, some mark of his contempt that will be heard outside of the ark, will impress and disconcert the congregation, but there simply has not been room enough to generate impact: the volume falls softly, turgidly across a knee, and he slaps at it in fury, little puffs of dust coming from the cover, inflaming his sinuses. He curses again, wondering if this apostasy, committed within the very place in which, according to what he understands, the spirit of God dwells, will be sufficient to end his period of torture, release him from this one kind of bondage into at least another, but nothing whatsoever happens.

He could have expected that, he thinks. If the tenant of the ark is indeed symbol rather than substance, then it would not matter what he did here or what he thought; only his presence would matter. And fling volumes of the Talmud, scrape at the Torahs, snivel away as he will, he is nevertheless in residence. Nothing that he can do will make any difference at all; his presence here is the only testament that they will need.

Step by tormenting step Leviticus has been down this path of reasoning-after-apostasy a hundred times during his confinement. Fortunately for him, these are emotional outbursts which he forgets almost upon completion, so that he has no memory of them when he starts upon the next; and this sense of discovery—the renewal of his rage, so to speak, every time afresh—has thus sustained him in the absence of more real benefits and will sustain him yet. Also, during the long night hours when only he is in the temple, he is able to have long, imagined dialogues with God, which to no little degree also sustain him, even if his visualization of God is a narrow and parochial one.

The first time that the doors had been flung open during the adoration and all of the congregation had looked in upon him, Leviticus had become filled with shame, but that quickly passed when he realized that no one really thought anything of it and that the attention of the elders and the congregation was not upon him but upon the sacred scripts that one by one the elders withdrew, brought to the podium, and read with wavering voice and fingers while Leviticus, hunched over naked in an uncomfortable fetal position, could not have been there at all, for all the difference it made. He could have bolted from the ark, flung open his arms, shrieked to the congregation, “Look at me, look at me, don’t you see what you’re doing!” but he had not; he had been held back in part by fear, another part by constraint, still a third part from the realization that no one in the ark had ever done it. He had never seen it happen; back through all the generations that he was able to seek through accrued knowledge, the gesture was without precedent. The tenant of the ark had huddled quietly throughout the term of his confinement, had kept himself in perfect restraint when exposed; why should this not continue? Tradition and the awesome power of the elders had held him in check. He could not interrupt the flow of the services. He could deal with the predictable, which was a term of confinement and then release, just like everyone who had preceded him, but what he could not control was any conception of the unknown. If he made a spectacle of himself during the adoration, there was no saying what might happen then. The elders might take vengeance upon him. They might turn away from the thought of vengeance and simply declare that his confinement be extended for an indefinite period for apostasy. It was very hard to tell exactly what they would do. This fear of the unknown, Leviticus had decided through his nights of pondering and imaginary dialogue, was probably what had enabled the situation to go on as long as it had.

It was hard to say exactly when he had reached the decision that he could no longer accept his position, his condition, his fate, wait out the time of his confinement, entertain the mercy of the elders, and return to the congregation. It was hard to tell at exactly what point he had realized that he could not do this; there was no clear point of epiphany, no moment at which—unlike a religious conversion—he could see himself as having gone outside the diagram of possibility, unutterably changed. All that he knew was that the decision had slowly crept into him, perhaps when he was sleeping, and without a clear point of definition, had reached absolute firmness: he would confront them at the adoration now. He would force them to look at him. He would show them what he, and by implication they, had become: so trapped within a misunderstood tradition, so wedged within the suffocating confines of the ark that they had lost any overriding sense of purpose, the ability to perceive wholly the madness that they and the elders had perpetuated. He would force them to understand this as the sum point of their lives, and when it was over, he would bolt from the synagogue naked, screaming, back to his cubicle, where he would reassemble his clothing and make final escape from the complex… and leave them, not him, to decide what they would now make of the shattered ruins of their lives.

The long period of confinement, self-examination, withdrawal, and physical privation had, perhaps, made Leviticus somewhat unstable.

Just before the time when the elders had appeared and had taken him away, Leviticus had made his last appeal, not to them, certainly not to the rabbi, but to Stala, who had shared to a certain point his anguish and fear of entrapment. “I don’t see why I have to go there,” he said to her, lying tight in the instant after fornication. “It’s stupid. It’s sheer mysticism. And besides that, it hasn’t any relevance.”

“But you must go,” she said, putting a hand on his cheek. “You have been asked, and you must.” She was not stupid, he thought, merely someone who had never had to question assumptions, as he was now being forced to. “It is ordained. It won’t be that bad; you’re supposed to learn a lot.”

“You go.”

She gave a little gasping intake of breath and rolled from him. “You know that’s impossible,” she said. “Women can’t go.”

“In the reform tradition they can.”

“But we’re not in the reform tradition,” she said; “this is the high Orthodox.”

“I tend to think of it more in the line of being progressive.”

“You know, Leviticus,” she said, sitting, breathing unevenly—he could see her breasts hanging from her in the darkness like little scrolls, like little scrolls, oh, his confinement was very much on his mind, he could see—“it’s just ridiculous that you should say something like that to me, that you should even suggest it. We’re talking about our tradition now, and our tradition is very clear on this point, and it’s impossible for a woman to go. Even if she wanted, she just couldn’t—”

“All right,” he said, “all right.”

“No,” Stala said, “no I won’t stop discussing this, you were the one to raise it, Leviticus, not me, and I just won’t have any of it. I didn’t think you were that kind of person. I thought that you accepted the traditions, that you believed in them; in fact, it was an encouragement to me to think, to really think, that I had found someone who believed in a pure, solid unshaken way, and I was really proud of you, even prouder when I found that you had been selected, but now you’ve changed everything. I’m beginning to be afraid that the only reason you believed in the traditions was because they weren’t causing you any trouble and you didn’t have to sacrifice yourself personally, but as soon as you became involved, you moved away from them.” She was standing now, moving toward her robe, which had been tossed in the fluorescence at the far end of his cubicle; looking toward it during intercourse, he had thought that the sight of it was the most tender and affecting thing he had ever known, that she had cast her garments aside for him, that she had committed herself trustfully in nakedness against him for the night, and all of this despite the fact that he was undergoing what he took to be the positive humiliation of the confinement; now, as she flung it angrily on herself, he wondered if he had been wrong, if that casting aside had been a gesture less tender than fierce, whether or not she might have been—and he could hardly bear this thought, but one must after all, press on—perversely excited by images of how he would look naked and drawn in upon himself in the ark, his genitals clamped between his thighs, talmudic statements by the rabbis Hill and Ben Bag Bag his only companions in the many long nights to come. He did not want to think of it, did not want to see her in this new perspective, and so leaped to his feet, fleet as a hart, and said, “But it’s not fair. I tell you, it isn’t fair.”

“Of course it isn’t fair. That’s why it’s so beautiful.”

“Well, how would you like it? How would you like to be confined in—”

“Leviticus,” she said, “I don’t want to talk to you about this anymore. Leviticus,” she added, “I think I was wrong about you, you’ve hurt me very much. Leviticus,” she concluded, “if you don’t leave me right now, this moment, I’ll go to the elders and tell them exactly what you’re saying and thinking, and you know what will happen to you then,” and he had let her go, nothing else to do, the shutter of his cubicle coming open, the passage of her body halving the light from the hall, then the light exposed again, and she was gone; he closed the shutter, he was alone in his cubicle again.

“It isn’t fair,” he said aloud. “She wouldn’t like it so much if this was Reform and she were faced with the possibility of going in there someday,” but this gave him little comfort; in fact, it gave him no comfort at all. It seemed to lead him right back to where he had started—futile, amazed protest at the injustice and folly of what was being done for him—and he had gone into an unhappy sleep thinking that something, something would have to be done about this; perhaps he could take the case out of the congregation. If the ordinators were led to understand what kind of rites were being committed in the name of high Orthodoxy, they would take a strong position against this, seal up the complex, probably scatter the congregation throughout a hundred other complexes… and it was this which had given him ease, tossed him into a long murmuring sleep replete with satisfaction that he had finally found a way to deal with this (because he knew instinctively that the ordinators would not like this), but the next morning, cunningly, almost as if they had been informed by Stala (perhaps they had), the elders had come to take him to the ark, and that had been the end of that line of thought. He supposed that he could still do it, complain to the ordinators—that was, after his confinement was over—but at that point it hardly seemed worth it. It hardly seemed worth it at all. For one thing, he would be out of the ark by then and would not have to face it for a very, very long time, if ever. So why bother with the ordinators? He would have to take a more direct position, take it up with the congregation itself. Surely once they understood his agony, they could not permit it to continue. Could they?

In the third of his imaginary dialogues with God (whom he pictured as an imposing man, somewhat the dimensions of one of the elders but much more neatly trimmed and not loaded down with the paraphernalia with which they conducted themselves) Leviticus said, “I don’t believe any of it. Not any part of it at all. It’s ridiculous.”

“Doubt is another part of faith,” God said. “Doubt and belief intertwine; both can be conditions of reverence. There is more divinity in the doubt of a wise man than in the acceptance of fools.”

“That’s just rhetoric,” Leviticus said; “it explains nothing.”

“The devices of belief must move within the confines of rhetoric, God said. “Rhetoric is the poor machinery of the profound and incontrovertible. Actually, it’s not a matter of doubt. You’re just very uncomfortable.”

“That’s right. I’m uncomfortable. I don’t see why Judaism imposes this kind of suffering.”

“Religion is suffering” God said with a modest little laugh, “and if you think Judaism is difficult upon its participants, you should get a look at some of the others sometimes. Animal sacrifice, immolation, the ceremony of tongues. Oh, most terrible! Not that everyone doesn’t have a right to their point of view,” God added hastily. “Each must reach me, each in his way and through his tradition. Believe me, Leviticus, you haven’t got the worst of it.”

“I protest. I protest this humiliation.”

“It isn’t easy for me, either,” God pointed out. “I’ve gone through cycles of repudiation for billions of years. Still, one must go on.”

“I’ve got to get out of here. It’s destroying my health; my physical condition is ruined. When am I going to leave?”

“I’m sorry,” God said, “that decision is not in my hands.”

“But you’re omnipotent.”

“My omnipotence is only my will working through the diversity of twenty billion other wills. Each is determined, and yet each is free.”

“That sounds to me like a lousy excuse,” Leviticus said sullenly. “I don’t think that makes any sense at all.”

“I do the best I can,” God said, and after a long, thin pause added sorrowfully, “You don’t think that any of this is easy for me either, do you?”

Leviticus has the dim recollection from the historical tapes, none of them well attended to, that before the time of the complexes, before the time of great changes, there had been another kind of existence, one during which none of the great churches, Judaism included, had been doing particularly well in terms of absolute number of participants, relative proportion of the population. Cults had done all right, but cults had had only the most marginal connection to the great churches, and in most cases had repudiated them, leading, in the analyses of certain of the historical tapes, to the holocaust that had followed, and the absolute determination on the part of the Risen, that they would not permit this to happen again, that they would not allow the cults to appropriate all of the energy, the empirical demonstrations, for themselves, but instead would make sure that the religions were reconverted to hard ritual, that the ritual demonstrations following would be strong and convincing enough to keep the cults out of business and through true worship and true belief (although with enough ritual now to satisfy the mass of people that religion could be made visible) stave off yet another holocaust. At least, this was what Leviticus had gathered from the tapes, but then, you could never be sure about this, and the tapes were all distributed under the jurisdiction of the elders anyway, and what the elders would do with material to manipulate it to their own purposes was well known.

Look, for one thing, at what they had done to Leviticus.

“I’ll starve in here,” he had said to the elders desperately, as they were conveying him down the aisle toward the ark. “I’ll deteriorate. I’ll go insane from the confinement. If I get ill, no one will be there to help me.”

“Food will be given you each day. You will have the Torah and the Talmud, the Feast of Life itself to comfort you and to grant you peace. You will allow the spirit of God to move within you.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Leviticus said. “I told you, I have very little belief in any of this. How can the spirit—?”

“Belief means nothing,” the elders said. They seemed to speak in unison, which was impossible, of course (how could they have such a level of shared anticipation of the others’ remarks; rather, it was that they spoke one by one, with similar voice quality—that would be a more likely explanation of the phenomenon, mysticism having, so far as Leviticus knew, very little relation to rational Judaism). “You are its object, not its subject.”

“Aha!” Leviticus said then, frantically raising one finger to forestall them as they began to lead him painfully into the ark, pushing him, tugging, buckling his limbs. “If belief does not matter, if I am merely object rather than subject, then how can I be tenanted by the spirit?”

“That,” the elders said, finishing the job, patting him into place, one of them extracting a rag to whip the wood of the ark speedily to high gloss, cautiously licking a finger, applying it to the surface to take out an imagined particle of dust, “that is very much your problem and not ours, you see,” and closed the doors upon him, leaving him alone with scrolls and Talmud, cloth, and the sound of scrambling birds. In a moment he heard a grinding noise as key was inserted into lock, then a snap as tumblers inverted. They were locking him in.

Well, he had known that. That, at least, was not surprising. Tradition had its roots; the commitment to the ark was supposed to be voluntary—a joyous expression of commitment, that was; the time spent in the ark was supposed to be a time of repentance and great interior satisfaction…. But all of that to one side, the elders, balancing off the one against the other, as was their wont, arriving at a careful and highly modulated view of the situation, had ruled in their wisdom that it was best to keep the ark locked at all times, excepting, of course, the adoration. That was the elders for you. They took everything into account, and having done that, made the confinement, as they said, his problem.

Now the ritual of the Sabbath evening service is over, and the rabbi is delivering his sermon. Something about the many rivers of Judaism, each of them individual, Bowing into that great sea of tradition and belief. The usual material. Leviticus knows that this is the Sabbath service; he can identify it by certain of the prayers and chants, although he has lost all extrinsic sense of time, of course, in the ark. For that matter, he suspects, the elders have lost all extrinsic sense of time as well; it is no more Friday now than Thursday or Saturday, but at a certain arbitrary time after the holocaust, he is given to understand, the days, the months, the years themselves were re-created and assigned, and therefore, if the elders say it is Friday, it is Friday, just as if they say it is the year thirty-seven, it is the year thirty-seven, and not fifty seven hundred something or other, or whatever it was when the holocaust occurred. (In his mind, as a kind of shorthand, he has taken to referring to the holocaust as the H; the H did this; certain things happened to cause the H, but he is not sure that this would make sense to other people, and as a matter of fact wonders whether or not this might not be the sign of a deranged consciousness.) Whatever the elders say it is, it is, although God in the imaginary dialogues has assured him that the elders, in their own fashion, are merely struggling with the poor tools at their command and are no less fallible than he, Leviticus.

He shall take upon himself, in any event, these commandments, and shall bind them for frontlets between his eyes. After the sermon, when the ark is opened for the adoration, he will lunge from it and confront them with what they have become, with what they have made of him, with what together they have made of God. He will do that, and for signposts upon his house as well, that they shall remember and do those commandments and be holy. Holy, holy. Oh, their savior and their hope, they have been worshiping him as their fathers did in ancient days, but enough of this, quite enough; the earth being his dominion and all the beasts and fish thereof, it is high time that some sort of reckoning of the changes be made.

Highly unfair, Leviticus thinks, crouching, awaiting the opening of the ark, but then again, he must (as always) force himself to see all sides of the question: very possibly, if Stala had approved of his position, had granted him sympathy, had agreed with him that what the elders were doing was unjust and unfair… well, then, he might have been far more cheerfully disposed to put up with his fate. If only she, if only someone, had seen him as a martyr rather than as a usual part of a very usual process. Everything might have changed, but then again, it might have been the same.

The book of Daniel, he recollects, had been very careful and very precise in giving, with numerology and symbol, the exact time when the H would begin. Daniel had been specific; he had alluded to precisely that course of events at which period of time that would signal the coming (or the second coming, depending upon your pursuit); the only trouble with it was that there had been so many conflicting interpretations over thousands of years that for all intents and purposes the predictive value of Daniel for the H had been lost; various interpreters saw too many signs of rising in the East, too many beasts of heaven, stormings of the tabernacle, too many uprisings among the cattle or the chieftains to enable them to get the H down right, once and for all. A lot of them, hence, had been embarrassed; many cults, hinged solely upon their interpretation of Daniel and looking for an apocalyptic date, had gotten themselves overcommitted, and going up on the mountaintops to await the end, had lost most of their membership.

Of course, the H had come, and with it the floods, the falling, the rising, and the tumult in the lands, and it was possible that Daniel had gotten it precisely right, after all, if only you could look back on it in retrospect and get it right, but as far as Leviticus was concerned, there was only one overriding message that you might want to take from the tapes if you were interested in this kind of thing: you did not want to pin it down too closely. Better, as the elders did, to kind of leave the issue indeterminate and in flux. Better, as God himself had (imaginarily) pointed out, to say that doubt is merely the reverse coin of belief, both of them motes in the bowels of the Hound of Heaven.

The rabbi, adoring the ever-living God and rendering praise unto him, inserts the key into the ark, the tumblers fall open, the doors creak and gape, and Leviticus finds himself once again staring into the old man’s face, his eyes congested with pain as he reaches in trembling toward one of the scrolls, his cheeks dancing in the light, the elders grouped behind him attending carefully; and instantly Leviticus strikes: he reaches out a hand, yanks the rabbi out of the way, and then tumbles from the ark. He had meant to leap but did not realize how shriveled his muscles would be from disuse; what he had intended to be a vault is instead a collapse to the stones under the ark, but yet he is able to move. He is able to move. He pulls himself falteringly to hands and knees, gasping, the rabbi mumbling in the background, the elders looking at him with shocked expressions, too astonished for the instant to move. The instant now is all that he needs. He has not precipitated what he has done in the hope of having a great deal of time.

“Look at me!” Leviticus shrieks, struggling erect, hands banging, head shaking. “Look at me, look at what I’ve become, look at what dwells in the heart of the ark!” And indeed, they are looking all of them, the entire congregation, Stala in the women’s section, and to face, palm open, extended, all of them stunned in the light of his gaze. “Look at me!” he shouts again. “You can’t do this to people, do you understand that? You cannot do it!” And the elders come upon him, recovered from their astonishment, to seize him with hands like metal, the rabbi rolling and rolling on the floor, deep into some chant that Leviticus cannot interpret, the congregation gathered now to rush upon him; but too late, it has (as he must at some level have known) been too late, from the beginning, and as the rabbi chants, the elders strain, the congregation rushes… time inverts, and the real, the longexpected, the true H with its true Host begins.