After every piano lesson, 11-year-old Roman would play with the sons of his piano teacher. They played Robinson Crusoe, Indians and cowboys, post office, checkers, and hunting. In that last game, Roman was always the runaway Hare, and the other two were Shotgun and Hound. Even after they got tired of that role-playing, the nicknames stuck for the duration of their friendship. For a while, the three boys were inseparable.
One day, when Roman came out to play with his friends, they were nowhere to be found. He waited a long time before Shotgun showed up, gloomy and aloof. He didn’t want to shake Roman’s hand. “We’re not going to play together anymore, ever again,” he said, looking at Roman with disgust.
Roman could barely believe his ears. “Why?” he asked.
“Because you killed God.”
It sounded completely absurd. Roman protested. He tried to reason with Shotgun, then to strike him. But just as he was about to deal a blow, a wave of helplessness swept over him. “But I am Hare,” he stuttered, almost crying. “How could a hare kill God?”
Roman tells this story in one of his later works, Krąg biblijny (Biblical circle). The boy grew up to be a prolific writer, a playwright, and a poet, Roman Brandstaetter. I sometimes wonder why he’s not known more widely. Outside of the Catholic left, he’s not really popular in present-day Poland. I couldn’t find any English or Hebrew translations of his work.
He’s difficult to categorize. That may partly account for his obscurity. All his life, he wrote exclusively in Polish. But apparently, he was not quite Polish enough since he never abandoned Jewish traditions. His language is suffused with Biblical metaphor and imagery. There’s a feeling of the Aggadah—the allegorical Jewish exegesis—in the way he approaches the two Testaments. Yet, again, he was not quite Jewish enough either. He was engaged in the Zionist cause (he came of age in the 1920s). But then he converted to Catholicism. He once dared suggest that the Zionist movement had its roots in the romantic nationalism of the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz. That went down well, as you can imagine.
“Biblical circle” is a collection of memories tied to the topic of the Scripture. But it’s also an exploration of Brandstaetter’s mis/belonging. He talks a lot about his grandfather, a rabbi and a writer himself, Mordekhai Brandstetter, who was his first guide to the holy text. The grandfather’s figure grounds the narrative. But very early on in the book, there appears a prickling of doubt. The memories become notes from the road—a documentation of a lifelong pilgrimage.
In “Biblical circle,” Brandstaetter tells a lot of stories. One of them has stuck with me over the years—and I decided a long time ago that if I ever wrote about deconstruction, I would make sure to talk about it somewhere at the beginning. The story was told to Roman by his grandfather, Mordekhai, who in turn heard it from his father, or Roman’s great-grandfather.
It happened sometime after the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in 70 A.D. In the city of Safed in northern Galilee, there lived a rabbi widely revered for his wisdom and holy life. One day, he was preaching a sermon in a local synagogue. He told the people how the sacrifices had ceased now that the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. In the days of old, it was customary, he said, to leave loaves of bread in the Temple as symbols of God’s presence. Now, this custom had been abandoned.
One of the people in the congregation was Abraham, an honest, pious man who spent his mornings and evenings praying in the synagogue. He listened to the sermon, and it cut deep into his heart.
He resolved that night that he would take a couple of freshly baked loaves of bread, sneak into the synagogue after it was closed and leave the bread there for God to enjoy.
And this is exactly what he did.
The next day when he came by and checked on the bread he had left in the synagogue, it had disappeared! Abraham took it as a sign that God had accepted his sacrifice. And his heart was filled with great joy.
Abraham continued this little tradition for some time until one night, he was caught in the act by the rabbi.
Apparently, the rabbi had discovered what had been going on, and he was not amused at all. “Do you know what happens to the bread you bring to the synagogue every night?” he asked derisively.
“It’s eaten by the Most High,” answered Abraham, bowing his head with humility.
Rabbi laughed. “You fool! Do you think God has hands for reaching out or a mouth to chew your food, or a stomach to digest it? You’re really a simpleton, a son of ignorance! The dishonest janitor has been eating your bread all along. I saw it with my own eyes. I saw it, and I wanted to find out what kind of madman would leave the bread in the synagogue every night. And now I know it was you! You ungodly man! How could you even think that God would eat your bread when He is invisible, infinite, and unbounded by matter? You’ve committed a great sin.”
Abraham burst out crying. He realized he had committed blasphemy. He went home embittered and disappointed, his spirit utterly crushed.
That night, the Elohim came to the rabbi. “You wanted to correct a pious man, but in your heated quest for the truth, you have forgotten that it is not important if it was really me, the Lord of Hosts, who was eating the bread, or if it was the dishonest janitor. What’s important is that Abraham, a man of honest heart, believed that I, God, was feeding on his bread. And now, what have you done? You’ve killed the faith of a pious man. That’s why you will die.”
In the morning, they found the rabbi’s body in his bed.
Roman’s grandfather told him that story because he was teaching his grandson about sins people commit in the name of the truth. “Such sins are the heaviest,” he said.
The notion of sin deserves more intense deconstruction than we can do in this post. (But we’ll get to it. The notes are there, at least.)
But I think we know the type of behavior that is meant here. It has a way of startling you, of stopping you dead in your tracks, how people who claim the highest moral ground can at the same time deal the most ruthless blows.
Mordekhai’s story is not the end-all, of course. It’s a parable. It’s meant to be ambiguous, to inspire protests and caveats. But I like to keep it in the back of my mind because it has a way of breaking my momentum. You see, I can get quite passionate about my dis/beliefs, and I don’t want the Elohim to pay me a visit late at night.
More importantly, I wanted to include it here as early as possible because when we first start deconstructing our beliefs, it may be a lonely road.
But “lonely” is not an absolute quality. We can make ourselves lonelier than necessary by being cruel to those who choose not to accompany us on our journey.
There is a beautiful verse in Proverbs that says, “The merciful man nourishes his own soul, but a cruel one destroys his own flesh” (11:17).
The idea of the Other as the extension of my own body is a powerful one in the Judeo-Christian Scripture. It is present in the marital and social ethics of the Pentateuch. It is there in the second most important commandment. It is there in the image of the Church as a living organism whose different members interact in harmony and unity.
Finally (or maybe firstly?), it is also there in the idea of the Christian God, whose most striking characteristic may well be that They exist in a group—moving in synergy, individual and different yet eternally happy together.
A few months ago, a question on Quora caught my eye. Somebody was asking how they could get their mother to stop worrying about them and their family going to hell. The person explained they were raised Evangelical but “left the church as an adult and deconstructed [their] indoctrinations.”
There were several answers to the question already, but none of them very helpful. “You should make her understand magic isn’t real,” one person said. “You could lie [sic!] and tell her that just before you die, you’re going to accept Jesus as your personal Savior and repent of your sins,” suggested another.
Other answers were in a similar vein. A few proposed some smart-ass ways of getting the mother to realize how wrong she was in holding on to her laughable superstitions—more ideas for fun dinner conversations.
Nobody paid any attention to the relationship crisis that had motivated the question. Nobody addressed the estrangement felt by the two parties whose common ground had been shaken up. Nobody took note of the pain and the guilt the mother must have felt seeing her child abandoning the beliefs she had fought so hard to instill in them. Nobody honored the fact that the person asking the question still cared about the superstitious woman in their life and looked for ways to ease her pain.
I once had a linguistics professor who would tell us in his lectures, “We rarely say what we mean, and we rarely mean what we say.”
He was talking about the metaphors we operate with in our daily lives. See what I did there? “Operate” is not meant literally. It’s supposed to evoke a specific image. (“Evoke” is another approximation. We’re not doing any real calling here.) Our language is full of such phrases. (“Full of,” conceiving of language as if it were a physical container when it’s an abstract construct.)
The idea of the metaphor is Linguistics 101. There is even a classic book published in the 1980s by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson called Metaphors we live by, where they talk about how our language encodes abstractions such as disagreement, time, control, or happiness. It’s a fun read and easily available online if you want to spend an evening thinking of how vague our everyday language really is—and how it reflects back on us. It really says less about the things we’re trying to describe and much more about the culture we’re embedded in.
If we can’t go a sentence or two in our daily lives without stumbling upon some kind of an approximation, it’s only logical to expect the same is true when we’re doing our thinking about the Sacred.
Let’s take the idea of hell, for instance, since it’s already surfaced in the Quora question above. What do we really talk about when we talk about hell? Do we mean a literal place, kind of like Houston but hotter, with furnaces ablaze and busy demons flitting to and fro, stirring the pots with moaning humans?
What are we really saying when we ask the question about evil? How can God be real when there is so much evil around us? Is there any explanation here that would make us feel better? Any reassuring story that would make us say, “Oh, thank you, the pain is much smaller now that I know it all serves some grand purpose thought up by an alien mind”?
What are we really asking about when we ask questions about God? This is a bit more complex because the idea of the deity is in bed with many others—the question of evil, above all, of fate, of the reality of our actions, but also of good. Interestingly enough, it’s not as common to hear questions about the existence of good. We take it for granted—we tend to view good as the default.
But when you really think long and hard about it, then the amazement settles in. Because really, how come? How come in the midst of all this suffering and greed and people fucked up so bad, beyond any point of repair, there can appear a glimmer of—yes, what is it? Another approximation, of course. A hope. A mercy. An unraveling in the usual fabric. And then, the surprise—the blinding surprise that despite our diet of fear and mediocrity we find ourselves reaching out into that opening. Leaning into the possibility that it could be different. Life could change. The miracle could come. Why? Why do we recognize ourselves in what comes from beyond us?
We may disagree over the exact form of the metaphors each of us uses to describe spiritual reality, but what we’re grasping at is common. When we’re talking about hell and the afterlife in general, we’re talking about the ultimate justice. Forgiveness. Restitution and vengeance. Why do we feel the wrongs should be righted? Does it even matter? The uniqueness of our experience here—is there a second chance? Or is this it—the only chance we ever get?
In the parable retold by Brandstaetter, the rabbi misses his chance to talk to Abraham about worship. (Another metaphor.) As the Elohim say(s), it’s not really important what happens to the bread. What’s important is, If there really is the possibility of a Beyond, how do we relate to that idea? What message do we send there? How do we want to present ourselves?
But the rabbi doesn’t reach into that moment of connection. He doesn’t want to stand together in wonder next to someone who he thinks is so beneath him. In the end, his fate is what we all fear—he faces death alone, and his body is found by strangers.
The parable is abridged and retold from Roman Brandstaetter, Krąg biblijny i franciszkański (Biblical and Franciscan circle), Warsaw: Pax, 1981. If you know of any translations of Brandstaetter’s work, please reach out—I’d love to hear about them!
The Quora question (with my answer) can be read here.