The same week it rained on the girls of the Chelm ward out in the woods, the ceiling of Hirsh’s apartment on the top floor of a communist-era building began, once again, to leak. He was half-tempted to let it go. Maybe pull up a chair and watch the water pool on the kitchen floor and run down under the stove, soak the floor, and spill from there into the apartment below. That might wake the Seligs up! Show Fruma the structural issues he contended with. The trouble with the world was that people were always hiding the truth from each other, cushioning the blows, so that humanity was never roused to confront its fate.
But the sound of the dripping water was maddening and the wet spots on the floor were cold. The combined effect made Hirsh miserable. Since misery loves company, he couldn’t help but call Fruma Selig up to his apartment. “You see what I live with?” he said, gesturing to the ceiling. “It’s bad enough to have that miser for a landlord on a good day, but this? If the rain keeps up through the night, I might drown while making breakfast. But what can I do?”
Since she was too tone-deaf to catch the rhetorical nature of his question, Fruma answered. “It seems to me that we should patch up the ceiling. Or better yet: patch up the roof, which is leaking onto the ceiling. Or, still better: the sky, which is leaking onto the roof.” She paused, considering. “But in the meantime, we might at least find a cup to catch the water.”
The trouble with Fruma was that she was always coming up with these pointless half-measures. As she looked for a cup, Hirsh decided to see if he could get under her skin. “Surely the best thing would be to patch up your God,” he said. “If he would stop taking a leak on us ordinary people all the time, we could leave the sky and the roof and the ceiling open and be fine.”
Fruma found a teacup and placed it on the floor, just so, to catch the next drips. “You really are an example to me,” she told Hirsh as she worked. “I’m a believer—and all I can think of is how we ought to get a cup. Even though you don’t believe in God, all it takes is a few drops from the ceiling and he’s instantly on your mind. And the way you blaspheme: it’s like you really care what he thinks.” She shook her head. “I still don’t understand why the bishop wouldn’t just let you convert. In your own way, you’re as committed as any of us.”
Hirsh sighed. “I hope you all freeze in outer darkness,” he said. But his insides ached. It had been years since that decision, but the reminder still hurt. He could feel it as surely as an arthritic can sense the coming rain.
How did it come about that Hirsh sat in Bishop Levy’s office, seeking permission to become a Mormon? It’s a long story. One to save for a rainy day.
It started like this: By the time the Church came to Chelm, Hirsh was already tired of being an atheist Jew. In his grandfather’s day, maybe, that had been enough to keep life interesting, but times had changed. A Jewish atheist born in Hirsh’s time was so late to the party that the cake had all been eaten and even the streamers taken down. Besides, it was too easy to reject the Jewish God, what with all the suffering and the Messiah not coming until he slowly ran out of plausible excuses for the delay. It was almost as easy, frankly, as rejecting the Christian God—for moonlighting as a Messiah and getting himself killed while leaving the world self-evidently unredeemed.
But for all his boredom with the philosophical simplicity of the position, Hirsh could not give up his atheism. It was what he believed, in every corner of his unrepentant heart. It was who he was. So when the Mormons came to town, Hirsh thanked the fortunate yet utterly random coincidence. He decided to become an atheist Mormon, however briefly, for the intellectual exercise. If he managed to upset someone in the process, so much the better.
He started with the missionaries. After posing a few basic questions about their faith’s purported history, he could tear it to shreds in his mind. A temple? A martyrdom? An exodus? The whole thing was obviously plagiarized from the Bible. Even the names sounded fake, shot off without thought. He had to work to remember the shockingly bland name “Joseph Smith.” And the ripped-off version of the Dead Sea in their stories? It was called, with the special kind of imagination it takes to evoke a total lack of imagination, the “salt lake.” When pressed for details about their own backgrounds, one missionary said that he was from a town called “Lehi”—probably having forgotten that he’d already told Hirsh that Lehi was the name of a prophet the Book of Mormon was supposedly all about. As far as the evidence was concerned, Hirsh had heard enough. The whole thing was a sloppy fraud. He doubted that Utah existed in any meaningful way.
But Hirsh knew that lasting atheism must be grounded in more than mere implausibility. Most people enjoyed believing in God too much to be dissuaded by an anachronism here or an idiocy there. No one could tell you where Sinai was, for example, but in the face of decision paralysis, people still liked the idea of God handing down rules. Like a viewer who will search an obviously fabricated play for a deeper kind of truth, religious people were all too happy to suspend their disbelief. That’s why it wasn’t enough to call the veracity of a sacred story into question: a true atheist needed strong reasons to actively reject God.
For that, it seemed to Hirsh, you had to study theology. You had to understand God’s purpose to point out where he had gone inexcusably wrong. And so it was that Hirsh set aside the question of whether Mormonism made rational sense so that he could pursue the question of how the faith made sense of a frankly unreasonable world.
The cup Fruma placed on the floor filled in less time than it had taken Hirsh to see through the missionaries’ story. But with the thick-headed optimism so cherished in her faith, she refused to give up. Instead, she fetched a pitcher, emptied the cup into it, and set the cup down again to catch the next drops. “It will take a little work to keep the cup emptied,” she admitted. “But I suppose it’s still easier than convincing Oskar to pay for repairs.”
Hirsh snorted. “In any sane belief system, that man’s existence would be enough to disprove God’s,” he pointed out. Why, after all, would an all-powerful and all-good being create a universe with Oskar the Miser in it? The thought boggled the mind and offended the heart’s sense of justice. To sidestep a moral problem on the scale of the world’s misers, a belief system would have to resort to some truly wild steps. Such as, for example, calling each human being co-eternal with God, thereby reducing the Almighty’s responsibility for the crime of creation. (It wasn’t the most elegant solution. To save God, Mormons had to imagine a universe in which Oskar the Miser had always existed. It was strange enough to imagine the grouchy old man as a tight-fisted baby. Stranger still to imagine him as a wispy premortal spirit, eagerly waiting for a body so he could experience material avarice. Or as an eternal intelligence, accepting the offer of a First Estate only because it sounded like an investment.)
“We shouldn’t judge another person just because they happen to sin differently than we do,” Fruma Selig said. “So Oskar is greedy and narrow-hearted and callous. Who isn’t once in a while? I admit that his lack of charity looks worse than your blasphemy or my self-importance, but in God’s eyes, the whole world must be filled with fools. We shouldn’t consider ourselves too clever for picking out one man’s faults.”
Fruma’s charitable attitude, however, was not enough to keep the ceiling from dripping. With a plink, plink, plunk, the cup kept filling up.
Hirsh tried to devise a devastating response to Fruma, but the sound was driving him to distraction. “I don’t think I’m clever for picking out any particular man’s faults,” he said. “What makes me clever is my ability to pick out God’s faults. The Almighty’s decision not only to tolerate some people, but also to use them in his work, happens to be an example.” It was, in Hirsh’s estimation, also the most damning example in a Latter-day Saint worldview. Mormons had an easier time accepting a bad world if they could believe in a good Church. Take that away and they started to struggle.
But Fruma just emptied the cup into the pitcher again. “This repair isn’t working quite yet,” she said. “Keep an eye on the cup. I’m going to get something to keep the pitcher from overflowing.”
Hirsh breezed through the missionaries’ lessons at first. He wasn’t looking for a thing to reject just yet: those were everywhere. He was looking for what set the Mormon message apart. For a group that wanted people to leave other religions to join theirs, though, they were terribly indirect about getting there.
The missionaries told Hirsh that God loves us and wants us to be happy, just like any other holy man since Hosea, and without any particular explanation of how landlords and cancer served that aim. They taught him that Jesus saves us, making clear that he hadn’t come to save anyone from the Roman Empire and its terrible brutality, but rather from such awful pleasures as coffee and wine. They explained that God communicates through modern prophets, while implying that the role of such a prophet was to wear a conservative suit while repeating basically the same things God had purportedly been talking about from the beginning of history.
It was all so dull that Hirsh almost missed the theological ju-jitsu, the tiny twists that turned everything on its head. Like when the missionaries mentioned Eve in passing, by way of illustrating some larger point, and seemed to be praising her.
“I thought she wasn’t supposed to take the fruit,” Hirsh said. Wasn’t the whole point of that ancient story to explain suffering by proving that we deserve it?
“She wasn’t supposed to, but she was wise enough to realize she needed to,” Elder Lehi said. “After all, if she hadn’t taken the fruit, we wouldn’t exist.”
Hirsh was puzzled. This was the Bible’s ground floor. You couldn’t just go and edit Genesis, could you? He shook his head. It didn’t make sense. “But if she needed to take the fruit, why did God ask her not to?”
Elder Lehi’s companion, who was from Lagos, shrugged. “If he told her exactly what to do, she wouldn’t have had the chance to figure it out and decide for herself, would she? The whole point of coming to earth is so we can learn and grow.” He glanced at Elder Lehi, who nodded. “We’ve got a diagram here we can walk you through. See, before the world was created, we were talking with God about this plan. We call it the Plan of Happiness…”
After that, it was hard for Hirsh to keep up. It turned out that if you took a right turn instead of a left out of Eden, the whole map changed. It soon became clear that Mormonism offered a novel view of God for Hirsh to reject. Classic divine failures, like the problem of evil, didn’t play out the same way on that landscape of belief. Obsession with agency, experience, and progression made it far too easy for Mormons to let God off the hook for the mess of the world they lived in.
Normally, Hirsh would start an argument against a faith by identifying a basic paradox. Good God, bad world. True scripture, flawed passage. Prophetic calls for justice, obnoxious religious reactionaries. But where to start in a community where people smilingly embraced contradictions? The missionaries were utterly indifferent to opposed pairs. “It must needs be that there is an opposition in all things,” their Book of Mormon said. Eternal glory involved receiving all heights and depths. God guaranteed freedom and expected conformity. For heaven’s sake, they spoke with reverence about a place called Liberty Jail!
To really pierce this system of thought from the inside, Hirsh would need something new. It would be a challenge, an interesting challenge. His heart raced with such anticipation that the missionaries initially assumed that he had felt the Holy Ghost. But Hirsh was not experiencing any divine haunting. He felt eager, exhilarated: the hunt had begun.
Shortly after wandering off to protect the pitcher, Fruma Selig reappeared with an umbrella. “This ought to help,” she said, opening it over the pitcher and cup. Sure enough, as the ceiling leaked, the dishes stayed dry. But once again, the floor got wet.
“You’re just moving the problem around,” Hirsh complained. “If I enjoyed wet socks, I wouldn’t have come down to see you in the first place.”
Fruma sighed. “At least moving gives a person something to do,” she said. “I’d rather wander a little in the wilderness than sit around in Egypt. But maybe we haven’t moved enough yet.” She looked up at the umbrella and considered the problem.
“It’s doing the exact opposite of what we want,” Hirsh said. “Instead of gathering the water, it’s scattering it.”
“Opposites can be useful,” Fruma said as she flipped the umbrella upside-down. “There. Let the gathering begin.”
Suddenly, instead of sliding out along the exterior, the droplets began sliding inward to pool at the umbrella’s center. Reluctant as he was to acknowledge it, Hirsh admitted to himself that Fruma had stumbled onto something: the umbrella would be able to hold a great deal more water than the cup. It was still a temporary solution—but in the face of entropy, what wasn’t?
“Thank you,” Hirsh said. “At least, for as long as this lasts.”
After he met the missionaries, it hadn’t taken long for Hirsh to discover the limits of their usefulness. It wasn’t only that they were young. There was also the trouble of missionaries being moved from one place to another too soon to really get to the meat of questions. The elder from Lagos left and his replacement, who came from Lyons, just repeated the same points in a different order. To create in himself a genuine crisis of Mormon faith, Hirsh realized he would have to go to Church.
He was surprised at how much he liked it. The people were mostly fools, but they were friendly. His neighbor Fruma was there. There was Isaac Peretz, who used to talk politics with Hirsh while they were in line at the corner store. Menachem Menasche, whom he often ran into at the library (sometimes literally, since they both liked to read and walk at the same time). He saw his favorite baker and a decent fisherman. They would ask him how he was doing. They would listen to his complaints.
He didn’t love everything, of course. But opposites can attract, and Hirsh felt that some aspects of the faith were almost exact opposites of something truly revolutionary. In Mormonism, for example, God spoke to the church through the prophet. If they’d just switched the order around, so that the prophet would call up God with complaints about the universe from the members of the Church, the faith might have done a lot of good in the world.
To be the sort of change he wanted to see in the ward, he decided one month to get up on fast Sunday and bear an untestimony. It was heartfelt but awkward that first time, a rough profession of his general atheism. But the ward members were tolerant and cheered him on as he gradually picked up how such things were supposed to go. Month by month, as he attended sacrament meeting, Sunday School, and elders quorum, his expressions of disbelief grew more specifically Mormon. Instead of only expressing disbelief in God, for example, he learned to also acknowledge the Book of Mormon as a fraud and the Church as corrupt. He started tossing in an occasional reference to his indifferent feelings toward his own scattered family, and even read enough to relate a sordid story or two about the pioneers.
These experiments were hardly complete. In a sense, Hirsh was still going through the motions, riding the momentum of his old convictions. He was feeling out the topics but hadn’t yet settled on how to best reject the new faith on its own terms. Still, he did not give up. He asked and he read. He would ponder, if not pray.
One month on Fast Sunday, Hirsh felt himself all but propelled from the pew to the stand. The cause was a random insight, which nonetheless seemed to enter his mind with a prototypically Mormon force. He had been reflecting, he told the ward, on Lorenzo Snow’s couplet: “As man is, God once was. / As God is, man may become.” And then a thought from Feuerbach had been drawn to his remembrance: “God did not create man; man created God.”
Fruma smiled brightly when he said that. She looked so proud of him, of how Mormon he was becoming.
That week, the Sunday School lesson happened to be about Ruth. The story wasn’t new to Hirsh, except in the sense that against the background of Mormonism, all things seemed to be. Listening to class members discuss the first chapter, Hirsh suddenly found himself weeping without understanding why. As soon as church was over, he made his way to Bishop Levy’s office and asked if he could sit down. The bishop immediately welcomed him in.
Speaking spontaneously, Hirsh expressed his wish to become a member of the Church. “I want this people to be my people,” he said. His heart was pounding. “And your God is the God I want to not believe in.”
But Bishop Levy shook his head. “I hope you always feel welcome here,” he said. His face was all sympathy, but his next words were a knife. “But if you don’t even want to believe in God, I can’t let you be baptized into the Church.”
Well? Hirsh was crushed. Almost he had felt at home here. The beliefs played tricks on you like that. The place for Zion’s tent was to be enlarged, spread among the nations, they said. But the stakes in the tent wall were strengthened against him. He could come, yes, but the faith belonged to the Church. No matter how much he read the Book of Mormon, no matter how much he learned about the history, no matter how well he learned to speak their strange language or let himself dream their strange dreams, he would never truly be a Latter-day Saint outside the Church’s fixed borders.
He could feel a heaviness settle across his chest. This, he realized bitterly, was the secret he’d been hunting for. Mormonism was more than a set of beliefs. It was an attitude. A reckless commitment to human potential, a certain irrational optimism about the value of a broken world. A wild initial embrace of the stranger who happened to stop in. But everything has its opposite: a faith that could include could also exclude. And in that, he discovered his driving reason for rejecting the Mormon god.
The umbrella made a beautiful bowl at first. But things can only be wrested so far from their design, and it was made to keep water out, not in. At the center of what was normally the umbrella’s top was a plastic cover that kept any water from seeping down along the umbrella’s stem. But from the inside, there was no cover and the seal was not quite watertight. As the umbrella filled, water began to weep slowly out of the center.
“It’s useless,” Hirsh muttered. “I should have known it would be useless. There’s nothing quite so stupid as wanting a thing to work.” He kicked over the cup, which was still sitting half-full on the floor. “If our useless landlord were called as bishop, would you still believe then?” he asked Fruma.
“I wouldn’t be excited,” she said. “But I don’t see what that has to do with belief. And I don’t see what my beliefs have to do with this rain.”
Beliefs had everything to do with the rain. The rain, Hirsh figured, was probably the world’s oldest theological question. Older than Elijah, and old as Noah. Why was the rain never there when you needed it—and why did it never stop when you’d had enough? “What if Oskar were called as the prophet?” he asked. “He’s old enough. Male enough. Opinionated enough. What if God said: that’s three for three on qualifications! I’d like to make him my mouthpiece. Would you still trust your God then?”
“You’re not very good at being kind when you’re frustrated,” Fruma said. “You’ll feel better when we fix this and your house gets warm and dry.”
“My house?” Hirsh said. “Not really. He owns the building, and I don’t think he cares that we live here.”
There was cold, wet water spilled across the floor and a slow leak still dripping from the ceiling. It could drive a man insane. Hirsh knew he had to get out, get away from it all. And so, before Fruma could say something reassuring, Hirsh stormed out, slamming the door behind him. He stormed down the stairs, and out through the building’s aging, Communist-era front doors into the dark of the night.
For a long time, he stood outside in the rain.
Well? God lets it fall on the just and the unjust.
Slowly, Hirsh felt his shirt soaking and his nerves softening. He turned around. Went back into the building, up the stairs. Into his apartment.
Fruma had borrowed the hose from his washing machine. She’d gone up into the crawlspace above the ceiling and left the umbrella there, upside down, with one end of the hose attached to the center. She’d threaded the other end down and strung it across the ceiling, until it came to a stop above a space on the counter where she’d put the pitcher. The pitcher had filled, and now dripped out into the cup. Fruma had placed a folded napkin under one side of the cup so that it leaned just a little forward and dripped into the sink. The water pooled in the bottom of the sink, then slid drop by drop down the drain. From there, it would pass through the pipes, from the pipes to the sewers, from the sewers to the river, and from the river to the sea. From the sea, it would evaporate into the clouds until it fell somewhere as rain. She’d also wiped up the floor, so for now at least, it was dry.
“I’ll call Oskar tomorrow,” Fruma said. “He might finally call someone to fix it. You never know.”
Hirsh was pretty sure he did know. But for her sake, just this one night, he could let the tiniest part of himself hope.
James Goldberg is a poet, playwright, essayist, novelist, documentary filmmaker, scholar, and translator who specializes in Mormon literature.
Artwork by David Habben.
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