For the Time Being (9 page)

Seventy-four years later, on August 11, 1943, a young woman wrote from Westerbork, a transition camp in the Netherlands: “It really doesn’t matter if it is I who die or another. What matters is that we are all marked men.”

N U M B E R S
      
       Ten years ago, I read that there were two galaxies for everyone alive. Lately, since we loosed the Hubble space telescope, we have revised our figures. There are maybe nine galaxies for each of us—eighty billion galaxies. Each galaxy harbors at least one hundred billion suns. In our galaxy, the Milky Way, there are four hundred billion suns—give or take 50 percent—or sixty-nine suns for each person alive. The Hubble shows, said an early report, that
the stars are “not 12 but 13 billion years old.” Two galaxies, nine galaxies … one hundred billion suns, four hundred billion suns … twelve billion years, thirteen billion years …

These astronomers are nickel-and-diming us to death.

They say there is a Buddha in each grain of sand. It is this sort of pop wisdom that makes the greatness of Buddhism seem aggravating. In fact, among major religions only Buddhism and Taoism can unblinkingly encompass the universe—the universe “granulated,” astronomers say, into galaxies.

Does anyone believe the galaxies exist to add splendor to the night sky over Bethlehem?

Teilhard de Chardin sent a dispatch from a dig. “In the middle of the tamarisk bush you find a red-brick town, partially exposed, with its houses, drains, streets…. More than three thousand years before our era, people were living there who played with dice like our own, fished with hooks like ours, and wrote in characters we can’t read.”

Who were these individuals? And who were the Mongol Wanschock family—the man and five sons who helped dig? Who, in fact, were the manic Chinese emperor, the manic Roman emperor, and the merry, monkish paleontologist who dug? Who were the peasants who worked the far tomb-fields, the painter who painted clouds, Rabbi Akiva who prayed and
Rufus who flayed him? The Trojans likely thought well of themselves, as we do, yet they are as gone as we will be; their last settlement died out in 1100 B.C.E. Who was that doctor whose hand propped the bird-headed dwarfs? Who were the Israeli man who split wood across the water, the nurse Pat Eisberg who washed babies like plates, the statistician who reckoned that we people alive today—displacing as our bodies together do only 1.1 billion cubic feet—would fit into Lake Windermere?

Who were the families whose loess-buried hearths Genghis Khan rode over on ponies, the people Stalin killed, the 79.2 billion of us now dead, the 5.9 billion of us now alive, the stub-legged three-year-old girl exuberant in underpants and hair bows who held out her arms, or Isaac Luria in exile?

Which of these people might yet be alive? The red baby likely lives, and his testicles have calmed to a normal color. Most of the Chinese peasants I saw working in a field are up and breathing. Maybe the Wanschock granddaughters are riding horses scornfully over the Mongolian plains, but husband and wife are long gone. The others have died, except probably the wood splitter whose maul rang the sky, and the thriving nurse Pat Eisberg. Is it important if the bird-headed dwarfs have died yet, or the statistician? If your father has died his death yet? Your child? It is only a matter of time,
after all. Why do we find it supremely pertinent, during any moment of any century on earth, which among us is topside? Why do we concern ourselves over which side of the membrane of soil our feet poke?

“One death is a tragedy; a million deaths are a statistic.” Joseph Stalin, that gourmandizer, gave words to this disquieting and possibly universal sentiment.

How can an individual count? Do individuals count only to us other suckers, who love and grieve like elephants, bless their hearts? Of Allah, the Qur’an says, “not so much as the weight of an ant in heaven and earth escapes from him.” That is touching, that Allah, God, and their ilk care when one ant dismembers another, or note when a sparrow falls, but I strain to see the use of it.

One small town’s soup kitchen, St. Mary’s, serves about 115 men a night. Why feed 115 individuals? Surely so few people elude most demographics and achieve statistical insignificance. After all, there are 270 million Americans, 19 million people who live in Mexico City, 16 million in greater New York, 26 million in greater Tokyo. Every day 1.5 million people walk through Times Square in New York; every day, almost as many people—1.5 million—board U.S. passenger planes. And so forth. We who breathe air now will join the already dead layers of us who breathed air once. We arise
from dirt and dwindle to dirt, and the might of the universe is arrayed against us.

“God speaks succinctly,” said the rabbis.

During the war, Nelly Sachs wrote,

What shall be the end of the little holiness

which still dwells in my sand?

The voices of the dead

speak through reed pipes of seclusion.

I S R A E L
      
       The presenting face of any religion is its mass of popular superstitions. It seems to take all the keenest thinkers of every religion in every generation to fend off this clamoring pack. In New Mexico in 1978, the face of Jesus arose in a tortilla. “I was just rolling out my husband’s burrito …,” the witness began her account. An auto parts store in Progresso, Texas, attracted crowds when an oil stain on its floor resembled the Virgin Mary. Another virgin appeared in 1998 in Colma, California, in hardened sap on a pine trunk. At a Nashville coffee shop named Bongo Java, a cinnamon bun came out of the oven looking like Mother Teresa—the nun bun, papers called it. In 1996 in Leicester,
England, the name of Allah appeared in a halved eggplant. Several cities—Kandy, Sri Lanka, is one—claim to own a tooth from the jaw of the Buddha. A taxonomist who saw one of these said it belonged to a crocodile.

When he leads trips to Israel, Abbot Philip Lawrence of the monastery of Christ in the Desert in Abiquiu, New Mexico, gives only one charge to his flock. “When they show the stone with the footprint of Christ in it,” he says, “don’t laugh.” There is an enormous footprint of Buddha, too, in Laos.

“Suddenly there is a point where religion becomes laughable,” Thomas Merton wrote. “Then you decide that you are nevertheless religious.” Suddenly!

One of the queerest spots on earth—I hope—is in Bethlehem. This is the patch of planet where, according to tradition, a cave once stabled animals, and where Mary gave birth to a son whose later preaching—scholars of every stripe agree, with varying enthusiasm—caused the occupying Romans to crucify him. Generations of Christians have churched over the traditional Bethlehem spot to the highest degree. Centuries of additions have made the architecture peculiar, but no one can see the church anyway, because many monasteries clamp onto it in clusters like barnacles. The Greek Orthodox Church owns the grotto site now, in the form of the Church of the Nativity.

There, in the Church of the Nativity, I took worn stone stairways to descend to levels of dark rooms, chapels, and dungeonlike corridors where hushed people passed. The floors were black stone or cracked marble. Dense brocades hung down old stone walls. Oil lamps hung in layers. Each polished silver or brass lamp seemed to absorb more light than its orange flame emitted, so the more lamps shone, the darker the space.

Packed into a tiny, domed upper chamber, Norwegians sang, as every other group did in turn, a Christmas carol. The stone dome bounced the sound around. The people sounded like seraphs singing inside a bell, sore amazed.

Descending once more, I passed several monks, narrow men, fine-faced and black, who wore tall black hats and long black robes. Ethiopians, they use the oldest Christian rite. At a lower level, in a small room, I peered over half a stone wall and saw Europeans below; they whispered in a language I could not identify.

Distant music sounded deep, as if from within my ribs. The music was, in fact, people from all over the world in the upper chamber, singing harmonies in their various tongues. The music threaded the vaults.

Now I climbed down innumerable dark stone stairs to the main part, the deepest basement: the Grotto of the Nativity. The grotto was down yet another smoky stairway, at the back of a stone cave far beneath street level. This was the place. It
smelled of wet sand. It was a narrow cave about ten feet wide; cracked marble paved it. Bunched tapers, bending grotesque in the heat, lighted a corner of floor. People had to kneel, one by one, under arches of brocade hangings, and stretch into a crouch down among dozens of gaudy hanging lamps, to see it.

A fourteen-pointed silver star, two feet in diameter, covered a raised bit of marble floor at the cave wall. This silver star was the X that marked the spot: Here, just here, the infant got born. Two thousand years of Christianity began here, where God emptied himself into man. Actually, many Christian scholars think “Jesus of Nazareth” was likely born in Nazareth. Early writers hooked his birth to Bethlehem to fit a prophecy. Here, now, the burning oils smelled heavy. It must have struck many people that we were competing with these lamps for oxygen.

In the center of the silver star was a circular hole. That was the bull’s-eye, God’s quondam target.

Crouching people leaned forward to wipe their fingers across the hole’s flat bottom. When it was my turn, I knelt, bent under a fringed satin drape, reached across half the silver star, and touched its hole. I could feel some sort of soft wax in it. The hole was a quarter inch deep and six inches across, like a wide petri dish. I have never read any theologian who claims that God is particularly interested in religion, anyway.

Any patch of ground anywhere smacks more of God’s presence on earth, to me, than did this marble grotto. The ugliness of the blunt and bumpy silver star impressed me. The bathetic pomp of the heavy, tasseled brocades, the marble, the censers hanging from chains, the embroidered antependium, the aspergillum, the crosiers, the ornate lamps—some humans’ idea of elegance—bespoke grand comedy, too, that God put up with it. And why should he not? Things here on earth get a whole lot worse than bad taste.

“Every day,” said Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, “the glory is ready to emerge from its debasement.”

The lamps’ dozen flames heated my face. Under the altar cloths, in the corner where the stone wall met the marble floor, there was nothing to breathe but the lamps’ oily fumes and people’s exhalations. High above my back, layer after layer of stone away, people were singing. After the singing dwindled, the old walls still rang, and soon another group took up the general song in a melody faint and pure.

In the fourth century, those Jewish mystics devoted to Ezekiel’s vision of the chariot wrote a text in which Rabbi Isaac said: “It is a five-hundred-year journey from the earth
to the firmament…. The thickness of the firmament is a five-hundred-year journey. The firmament contains only the sun, moon and stars…. The waters above the firmament are a five-hundred-year journey. From the sea to the Heaven of Heavens is a five-hundred-year journey. There are to be found the angels who say the
Kedushah
.”

The text goes on to describe more five-hundred-year journeys upward to levels each of a thickness of a five-hundred-year journey: to the level of myriads and myriads ministering to the Prince above the firmament, to the level of the Canopy of the Torah, to the rebuilt Temple, to “the storehouses of snow and the storehouses of hail,” and above them to the treasure-houses of blessing and the storehouses of peace. Above all that lies a thick layer of wings and hooves, and “the chariot to come.” Above these seven heavens and the seven thicknesses between them is a layer of wings as thick as all the seven heavens and the distances between them together, and “above them is the Holy One, blessed be He.”

Standing again, rubbing my fingers together, I found more stone stairways, more levels, and the street, the sunlight, the world. I found a van in the parking lot of what used to be, I try to tell myself, a stable—but this story was worn out for now, the paradox and scandal of any incarnation’s occurring in a stable. More powerful at the moment was the sight of
people converging from all over the world, people of every color in every costume, to rub their fingers across a flat hole in a bossy silver star on the cracked marble floor of a cave.