Killing the Buddha Page 14

  “Yes! And in return, I asked for one thing—what was that?”

  “Oh, Lord! Justice!”

  The prosecutor, who would not comment on his plans to run for higher office, who was a lector in his Catholic church, the racial mix of which he told us he had never noticed, who loved hockey and his two children and his wife, none of whom he had brought that morning to Faith Tabernacle, who said there were no bad parts of his town, the prosecutor had asked for one thing.

  Votes? No, no.

  “Your thoughts and your prayers!”

  “Power in the Blood” resumed, the red-hatted woman belting, “We got it! We got it! We got it!” A woman in the second row of the choir let her long hair fly as she slammed her torso backward and forward like a wet rag snapping. The detectives danced, hips and shoulders this way, then that. Despite ourselves, we did too, even though it made us feel like accomplices, two more lightning rods for the power Faith Tabernacle meant to draw down from the sky and up from the grave. We got it whether we wanted it or not, though what it was we couldn’t say. They’d already had deliverance, that was how they’d come to America. And they were certain each and every one of them was saved. What did they want? Not chicken bones, not candles, and not a creamy white Christ bleating “Forgive!” They wanted blood. To get it they needed power. “We got it! We got it!” They needed the D.A. who stacked their young men up in jails like piles of sugarcane. “We got it!” They had it, and now the D.A. felt it, the power they had. We could see it in the way his bones seemed to shake free from their joints and the way his bright white teeth sparked electric, as Faith Tabernacle anointed him—old women running to him, young men seizing him, the choir singing for him, the pastor smiling at him. He gave his smile back to the pastor. It was as though, both would later claim, there was no more black and white between them. Just red. A wave of it that could take Lucious Boyd to the chair, the prosecutor to the judge’s bench, and the Reverend to a brand-new marble pulpit.

  Lucious Boyd didn’t say a word at his sentencing hearing a few days later. “Nice to see you, Mr. Boyd,” the judge said; Lucious Boyd simply nodded. We sat in the visitors’ gallery, ten feet away. He had sleepy eyes and a broad jaw, a face that spread out like an alluvial plain, handsome but tired; his skin was as gray as it was brown. Every day of the trial he’d worn a new suit, but now he wore a prison-issue coverall, beige. It rounded his shoulders and made his chest look hollow, but still he smiled, even for the prosecutor, just as he had smiled at the Reverend when the Reverend had sat in the gallery, praying for justice and power and blood. Why not? They’d won the war, to them went the spoils. Lucious was a preacher himself. He knew the cost of a covenant. He knew a deal had been struck on the foundation of his body. Over his bones the Reverend and the prosecutor would not just shake hands but bind themselves together in order to build a bright red temple.

  Sentenced to death, Lucious Boyd would never hear the temple’s choir. Nor would Dawnia’s mother. “I don’t need that church no more,” she told us when we went to her beauty parlor and sat in an empty room behind the styling chairs, lit by cold blue fluorescent bulbs. She had hated Victory Day. As far as she was concerned, “Power in the Blood” belonged to Dawnia. And she had hated the things people had said to her there. “People say God use Dawnia as a sacrifice. People say God use her to kill Lucious.” She paused, for a moment too angry to speak. “But people use God in a wrong way.”

  Where were you when I laid the foundations

  of the earth?

  JOB 38:4

  Job

  BY PETER TRACHTENBERG

  One

  What’s the difference between a Jew and a pizza?

  What do you call an Ethiopian with two dogs?

  How can you tell a cancer patient from a bowling ball?

  One of the most persistent problems in Western theology concerns the relation between God and suffering. Why does God allow the innocent to suffer, or conversely, why does He spare the wicked? The attempt to solve this problem is called theodicy. Here one ought to add that suffering is problematic only in the monotheistic religions, e.g., Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, since only they posit a Creator who is both infinitely powerful and infinitely good. We might represent such an entity by a Venn diagram (named for the English cleric and logician John Venn), a group of circles, each representing a logical set, the intersection of which denotes the elements those sets have in common. Picture such a diagram in which one circle represents infinite power and the other infinite goodness:

  Where these circles overlap, we find God.

  Note that the second figure contains no representation of suffering. From a purely logical perspective, suffering seems to have no place in a universe governed by a God who is both infinitely powerful and infinitely virtuous. Put aside the question of what constitutes suffering, or say that suffering falls along a continuum that ranges from a shaving cut to death by torture. Put aside, as well, the question of whether any creature (saints, unborn babies, idiots, dumb animals) can be called innocent. As Nickles sings in Archibald Macleish’s J. B.:

  If God is God He is not good,

  If God is good he is not God…

  I would have saved them if I could

  But for the little green leaves in the wood

  And the wind on the water.

  One way around this problem is to posit that God is omnipotent but not entirely good. Say He’s actively malign, as some of the Gnostics thought, or is so sporadically, is subject to mood swings, has His good days and His bad days. Some of which last for aeons.

  Note how this hypothesis allows suffering back into the picture.

  On the other hand, He may not be as powerful as we thought. In the Kabbalah, for example, we find the idea that in the act of creating the universe, God retreated or somehow contracted, like someone who sucks in his stomach while exhaling, creating a vacuum in which evil and suffering could come into being.

  And then you have the Catholic notion that God made a special exception for free will, in the manner of those Turkish weavers who leave blank spaces in the pattern of their kilims. According to this proposition, the Lord orders everything in the universe except for our impulses and actions.

  Unfortunately, ever since the Fall, our actions are contaminated by sin—

  —leading to the human proclivities for lying, fornication, self-abuse, murder, et cetera. Leading also to the inevitability of suffering.

  Lest this proposition seem too depressing, the doctrine of Providence asserts that the Deity permits the existence of suffering but over the course of centuries and millennia turns it—subverts it—to His own ends. These are always good:

  In other words, all suffering is an intermediary step in the progress toward a final redemption (a redemption made complete by the equally final damnation of the wicked), suffering is therapeutic, and the agony of past and present innocents is a mere technical difficulty, a speed bump. One imagines a procession of the murdered and tormented and enslaved, clad in emblematic garments—bloody pelts, togas, breechclouts, buskins, the swaddling clothes of infants, dhotis, the shabby suits of the passengers on the trains to Auschwitz, Mao jackets and Vietnamese ao dai, the head kerchiefs of Bosnian women, the denim overalls of African American sharecroppers—all winding toward the vanishing point of Heaven, while alongside them a conga line of perpetrators—Roman centurions and black-clad SS men, knights in spiked breast-plates, Spanish conquistadors and hooded Klansmen—moves in the opposite direction, into the maw of Hell. This cannot be represented by a Venn diagram.

  There are other options. The clever Buddhists leave God out of the picture and envision a universe characterized by the unimpeded play of desire, governed only by karma, which is basically the Newtonian law of motion translated into moral terms.

  And then you have systems in which the deity is supplanted by the laws of history or class struggle or psychological drives.

  But by now the equation is getting to look a little cluttered. It
lacks elegance. We might be better off factoring out some of its excess terms. Psychological drives can go.

  And we can forget class struggle. That leaves us with only “history,” otherwise known as Providence. Either way, it can be eighty-sixed.

  We can eighty-six God.

  But when everything else is factored out, there is still suffering.

  It is what remains.

  Two

  I know you’ve heard this one: “There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God and eschewed evil.” Note that verb feared. This is a story from the time before human beings learned to love God, before they came to think of God as their best friend. I believe that it is the most truthful story in the Bible. Most of those stories fall into the category of history or prophecy: They tell us what was or what shall be. But this story, Job, tells us about what is. Alone of the Bible’s narratives, it is set in an unspecified time, after the Fall but before the Last Judgment. Its protagonist isn’t even a Hebrew. He could be any of us, only better.

  Along with being upright, Job is rich. The book inventories his blessings: seven sons and three daughters; seven thousand sheep and three thousand camels; one thousand oxen and five hundred she-asses. And because he is both virtuous and fortunate, he becomes the object of a wager. The wager takes place between God and Satan. Those of us who thought of Satan as God’s implacable nemesis may be a little startled to find them getting along as famously as they do in Job. In this story Satan isn’t the serpent in the garden or the commander of the rebel hosts. In the original Hebrew he’s called ha-Satan, “the Satan,” “the Adversary,” a title that designates an angel who roams the earth, exposing human evil: a prosecutor. So he and God are colleagues of a sort, two guys chatting around the watercooler. God asks Satan where he’s been, and Satan tells him: “Oh, you know, to and fro.” Up and down. And then God asks Satan, “Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God and escheweth evil?”

  The Lord is boasting a little here. He’s twitting Satan, that specialist in wickedness, with a perfect specimen of virtue. You can see how that might be irritating. Every boast is an implicit challenge, and Satan responds to God’s with one of his own: “Doth Job fear God for naught?” That word again: Fear. “Hast not thou made a hedge about him, and about his house, and about all that he hath on every side? Thou hast blessed the work of his hands, and his substance is increased in the land. But put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face.” Two thousand years of literature and folklore have taught us never to bet with the devil. But maybe that applies only to humans, whose souls are so small and vulnerable and so easily lost. God takes the bet. He’s tempted. He says to Satan: “Behold all that he hath is in thy power.” From that moment, Job is doomed.

  At this juncture I’d like to tell you a joke. There’s a Jew, a Cambodian, and a Bosnian. Or maybe it should be a Jew, a Kosovar, and a Tutsi. An Armenian, a Lakota Indian, and an African-American. It’s hard choosing victims, there are so many of them. How do you decide who’s suffered most? Say the Jews lost 6 million in the Holocaust, which puts them ahead numerically, but 800,000 Tutsi were slaughtered in a matter of months, with knives and machetes, mostly. Doesn’t that sort of even things out? Is it more or less horrible that under the Khmer Rouge a million Cambodians were killed by other Cambodians? Does that count as genocide or fratricide? You see my difficulty.

  Of all the calamities that follow, God is technically innocent. He never lifts a finger against Job. He just withdraws His—what did Satan call it?—his hedge.(An interesting word. A hedge often encloses a garden, like the Garden of Eden, the home we lost because we were foolish enough to let the devil trick us into breaking the lease: the home that is now hedged against us.) But with that hedge gone, Job is naked in the devil’s wilderness. And Satan puts forth his hand and with staggering rapidity strips Job of everything—seven thousand sheep and three thousand camels, one thousand oxen and five hundred she-asses, seven sons and three daughters: all gone. Messenger after messenger comes to him with the bad news; it’s like some gruesome version of the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera. But Job holds fast to his integrity, a word that keeps recurring in this story with subtly different meanings. Even in the abyss of grief he blesses the name of the Lord—which confounds Satan, who predicted that he would curse God.

  Which reminds me of another joke. An old Jew—let’s call him Job—is stricken by a series of tragedies. Practically overnight his business goes bust, his house burns down, his children are killed in a bizarre accident. But when his friends come to mourn with him, they find him laughing. “Job, Job!” they cry. “What’s the matter with you? You’ve lost everything, you ain’t got a pot to piss in. What do you got to laugh about?”

  And Job says, “I still got my health.”

  Maybe Satan knows this joke, because now he assaults Job’s body. Once more God gives His permission—with the lukewarm caveat that the subject’s life be spared. (“But spare his life.” “Oh yeah.” Wink, wink. “Sure! Don’t worry. He’ll be fine!”) And the Adversary smites his victim with burning sores from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head. The noose of suffering has been drawn as tight as it can get. Destitute, childless, nerve ends shrieking, Job squats on an ash heap, scraping his chancres with a potsherd. His wife jeers at him: “Dost thou still retain thine integrity?”—and from her lips integrity becomes a term of derision, a synonym for moronic high-mindedness. “Curse God,” she says, “and die.”

  So you have these three people, I don’t know, a Cambodian, a Bosnian, and someone from Sierra Leone. The Cambodian’s lost a leg to a land mine, the Bosnian was blinded by a Serbian paramilitary, and the guy from Sierra Leone had his hands chopped off. And the Cambodian says…the Cambodian says. What does he say? Help me out, somebody. I’m dying up here.

  Now at this point something strange and radical happens. The story of Job comes to an abrupt stop, as though someone had hit the pause button, and gives way to a symposium—a wild, brilliant, bitter, oracular debate—on the riddle of divine justice. Why does God allow the righteous to suffer? On one side of the debate are Job’s friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar. They’ve come to comfort him. The way they do this is to tell Job more or less the same things that clergymen will be telling their congregants for the next few thousand years, whenever the lives of those congregants collapse or disintegrate for no apparent reason: to comfort them. They tell him that no evil can come from God; that God is always just, rewarding the righteous and punishing the wicked; that, given the inherent vileness of the human species (“What is man that he should be clean?”), it’s likely that one falls into the latter category and has done something to deserve being worked over; that one should view one’s misfortune as a divine reproof—as discipline—and accept it, be grateful for it, and repent the sin, whatever it was, for which the discipline was administered, so that God may restore one.

  It’s amazing. Here for the first time are all the gaseous platitudes that priests and rabbis and ministers have used ever since to anesthetize the grief-stricken—or shame them into silence. Here are the unctuousness and the sadism, the lubricant and the whip. What’s even more astonishing is that the platitudes work: We suck them up, they make us feel better. Why should this be so? The only reason I can think of is that most people would rather feel guilty than feel helpless. Guilty for the baby dead in its cradle; guilty for drought, guilty for floods, guilty for plague. Guilty for earthquake, guilty for fire, guilty for Auschwitz and Treblinka; for the Middle Passage, guilty, for Wounded Knee, guilty; for Siem Reap and Sarajevo, guilty. Guilty for cancer, guilty for AIDS. Better to believe you brought this on yourself—chose it for yourself—than that it just happened to you. For no reason.

  But this is exactly Job’s understanding: that all that has happened to him has happened for no reason. �
�He breaketh me with a tempest and multiplieth my wounds without cause.” In spite of everything those noxious comforters tell him, he insists he’s blameless. Not just him but the countless others whom God humiliates and destroys. None of them deserves this. How can I convey the audacity of this position? Or its difficulty? When you come to understand that God permits evil to exist and even to triumph, there are two temptations: atheism or polytheism; to reject God or to fragment Him. (If you’re an atheist, you believe that evil just exists by itself. And if you’re a polytheist, you can blame all the horror and wretchedness of this world on an evil deity and attribute its sweetness and splendor to a good one. You can even claim that these deities are at war. You can, in other words, do exactly what Christians have been doing for two thousand years.) But Job stubbornly clings to one indivisible God, and stubbornly goes on arguing his case before Him. He’s cranky, litigious, unappeasable—he’s a pain in the ass, really. But this is the meaning of his integrity. The comforters try to shut him up and he shouts over them, up at the invisible figure on the bench, the judge he knows is dead set against him but from whom he still awaits justice: “Though he slay me yet will I trust in him.”

  “Though He Slay Me Yet Will I Trust in Him.” Not a hymn but a torch song, addressed by a tormented lover to the faithless beloved, the beloved gone missing. A song of betrayal and absence. You picture her—because these songs are always sung by women—standing alone inside a cone of light, on display in her abjection. She’s wearing a sleeveless dress of burgundy satin; her shoulders gleam like marble. In the dark beyond the stage men sit drinking at café tables, and her eyes seek them out one by one as she sings—Are you the one? Are you the one? Are you?—and then move on. “Oh that I knew where I might find him!” Her song is filled with accusation and entreaty, fury and despair, and finally with exultation, because if the beloved is gone, there’s still this feeling he’s left behind. Misery is his last gift to her, and she’s drunk with it: He isn’t any good, he isn’t true, but I’ll stick to him like glue. Can’t go on, everything I had is gone. How could you leave me? How could you leave me? What can I do with this broken heart? You have no heart, Johnny. And I still love you so.