The Great Good Thing Read Free

some little girl who lost her pet bunny but Jesus brought it back again? “Oh, God,” I prayed fervently more than once, “whatever happens, don’t let me become a Christian novelist!”
    Even that prospect, terrible as it was, was only a part of the greater danger. If I became a Christian, would I lose my freedom of thought? Would I sacrifice my ability to question every proposition and examine every belief to the bone? Would I lose my realism and my tragic sensibility? Would I descend into that smiley-faced religious idiocy that mistakes the good health and prosperity of the moment for the supernatural favor of God?
    These were not just academic questions. I was living a good life now, and I was content, but that hadn’t always been the case. I’d been miserable and twisted as a young man, angry and soul-sick and mired in foolish delusions. My sanity had been hard fought for and hard won. Reality mattered to me: it was the medicine that kept me well. I had no desire whatsoever to cling to any comforting lies, or to any lies at all. I had no desire whatsoever to believe in a God who wasn’t there.
    Then, too, there was the matter of my Jewish identity, surely as big a stumbling block as any. I had never been a religious Jew. I had been forced to go to Hebrew School as a child, and I had been bar-mitzvahed at thirteen. But I had hated the Jewish rite of passage, not for itself but because it was an act of hypocrisy in my case. I had rejected the faith—and all faith—not long afterward.
    Still, a Jew I remained, racially and culturally. I had the face for it, no question, and the wise-guy urban attitudes, the love of intellection and debate, and the irreverent sense of humor, an almost pathological inability to take myself or anyone else seriously. I knew the history of my people well and identified with it: both our miraculous triumphs and achievements and the correspondingly demonic hatred we inspired. I was proud when a Jew won a Nobel Prize or hit a home run. And I never let an ugly remark go unanswered, or tried to pass myself off as anything other than what I was.
    If I had any discomfort with my Jewishness, it arose in the face of cultural clichés, the sort of stereotypes that were circulated as often by other Jews as by gentiles. I didn’t like to see Jews in books and movies routinely portrayed as weak or cowardly, incompetent with machinery or uncomfortable with the outdoors. I wasn’t anything like that. I’d been in plenty of schoolyard duke-outs as a kid and proved I could take a punch and throw one. Like my father before me, I could fix pretty much anything given the right tools. And I’d been an outdoorsman, camping and fishing and hiking, much of my life. I didn’t like it when Jews were described as cosmopolitan either, unattached citizens of the world. Me, I was American through and through. I was born here, and a patriot to my bones.
    But to turn away from my Jewish heritage—even to seem to turn away—to join what many of my fellow Jews considered the religion of the enemy—was no small thing, not to me. I had thought and read and written a good deal about the causes and effects of anti-Semitism, and for a time I had wholly immersed myself in studying the unfathomable wickedness of the Holocaust. No thinking person would call such cruelties “Christian,” but likewise no one could deny the historic role and responsibility of the church in this inextinguishable hatred and its resulting atrocities. It was the default belief of many Jews that a Jew who converted was trying to exempt himself from that hostility, trying to ingratiate himself with his gentile oppressors. (“They’ll still throw you in the ovens,” was the immediate response of one Jewish friend when I told him about my baptism.) I was a public man. I wrote and said things and people read and heard them. I did not want anyone, anywhere, ever to think I had betrayed my people, the greatest and most persecuted among the