One morning in tenth grade, my Bible teacher started class by holding up a copy of The New York Times. He was the one we called Little Adler, to distinguish him from his older, taller brother, Big Adler, who also taught at the school. Little Adler was a good guy, at a place that was notably short on them. A modest, bearded man, slightly pstooped, he was compassionate, he had a dry sense of humor, and he was the only teacher that I came across, in my ten years of yeshiva day school education, who told us that it was okay to ask questions — meaning fundamental questions, questions of belief. “Every story on the front page today,” he announced that morning, “is about the Jews.” Then he proceeded to point at them one by one, explaining why. Some were obvious. This was the year of the Camp David accords, and there were one or two articles about that. But the front page of the Times, back then, had eight or nine stories, and as he worked his way around the page, his reasoning became increasingly Talmudic. Nonetheless, in every case, he managed to find a way to connect the events in question to the fortunes of the Jewish people. “And,” he concluded, “you can do this every day.” Every day, in other words, one way or another, every story on the front page of the New York Times was ultimately about us. I grew up in a world that had a thick black line down the middle of it. On one side were us, the Chosen People, the “holy nation.” On the other side were them, the goyim. Each day in morning prayers we thanked the Lord for not making us Gentiles. On Saturday nights we recited the havdalah, the prayer that marks the close of the Sabbath. “Blessed are you O Lord our God king of the universe,” we said before the flickering light of a braided candle, “who distinguishes between sacred and profane, between light and darkness, between Israel and the nations, between the seventh day and the six days of creation.” It was an early lesson in grammatical parallelism. The goyim were inferior to us. They indulged their brutish appetites. They ate pig. They ate horse. They ate shrimp, which was practically like eating insects. They ate “creeping things that crawleth upon the ground.” They drank themselves blind. Oy, oy, oy, went the Yiddish ditty, shikker iz a goy, a drunkard is a Gentile. The maid was the goya; foolish pleasures were goyishe naches, Gentile delights; a dummy had a goyishe kopf, Gentile head. One night my father and I were watching a cop show. The detective’s friend had just gotten out of prison. “What can I get you?” the detective asked. “A bottle and a blonde,” the friend replied. “Of course,” my father said. “Why of course?” I asked. “Because that’s how a goy celebrates,” he said. The goyim hated us — every one of them, without exception. The only difference was whether they did so openly or not. Scratch a goy, my father would say, and you find an anti-Semite. Their hatred was eternal: it had existed since our beginning as a people, and it would persist until the coming of the Messiah. History did not progress but turned back on itself in an endless loop: persecution, redemption, persecution, redemption. The antagonists were not merely similar; they were identical, and had a name: Amalek. In the Book of Exodus, after Moses has led the Children of Israel in flight from Egypt — “when you were faint and weary,” he later reminds them — they are attacked by a tribe of that name. After the battle, Moses builds an altar and swears an oath: “The Lord shall be at war with Amalek for all generations.” It was Amalek whom we saw in history’s perseveration: Assyria, Babylon, Haman, Antiochus, Rome, the Crusades, the Inquisition, Chmelnitzki, the pogroms, Hitler, the Soviet Union, the Arabs. “In every generation and generation,” we sang at the Passover Seder, “they rise up to destroy us.” History, beyond that, was a blank. Of everything else that had happened to the Jewish people, or had been done by them — medieval Hebrew poetry, the life of the shtetl, Yiddish theater, the German-Jewish bourgeoisie; the ancient Jewish communities of Rome, Salonika, Alexandria; the Jews of Yemen, Morocco, Cochin; Baruch Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn, Heinrich Heine — we were programmatically ignorant. Between the Exile and the State of Israel, history was one unchanging scene of persecution. At the same time, as Little Adler reminded us that morning, history was all about us, now as in the past. Wasn’t Christianity, after all, a bastard outgrowth of the Jewish faith? Wasn’t their Bible primarily stolen from ours, and the very messiah they worshipped a Jew? And Islam grew out of Christianity, and Hitler started World War II to exterminate the Jews, and Israel occupied the crossroads of the world, they couldn’t stop talking about it at the United Nations, and in the end of days the final battle would be fought on Mount Megiddo between Gog and Magog, symbolized by an eagle and a bear, which obviously referred to the United States and the Soviet Union. Our job was to keep the commandments. There were a lot of commandments (six hundred and thirteen delineated in the Bible, plus thousands more elaborated by the rabbis). There were things you couldn’t say and things you had to say, things you couldn’t do and things you had to do. Prayers morning, afternoon, and evening; blessings before sleep, after using the bathroom, before and after meals; holidays and fasts throughout the year. No mixing meat and dairy, no bread (or rice or beans or corn) on Passover, no using electricity, or playing music, or driving a car, or riding a bicycle, or handling money, or cooking, carrying, writing, tearing (I could go on) on the Sabbath. Boys and men wore yarmulkes and
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