We live in God-haunted times, where a sizable percentage of the world population aspires to have a more personal relationship with their deity. Shalom Auslander might be the only member of the faithful who makes it a point to regularly tell his creator to go fuck himself. The author of Foreskin’s Lament may be a heretic, an apostate or simply the Wicked Son. But although he has left the Hasidic community behind, he leaves no doubt that God is still with him, watching him, waiting for that perfect moment to punish him for a multitude of sins.
In
a memoir that manages to be playful, profane and profound, Auslander describes
his unhappy childhood as a member of a dysfunctional household in the religious
enclave of Monsey, New York. His father is an abusive alcoholic. His mother is
a perpetual lady of sorrow, obsessed by death and dying. The older brother is an
ineffectual rebel, constantly challenging the father’s limited authority and
then feeling the full force of the father’s rage. The younger sister is always off to the side,
lamenting everyone’s bad behavior.
Shalom
gets stuck in the middle, at first trying to keep up peace in the family with
humorous skits based on SNL characters. But increasingly, it is Shalom who acts
out the rebellious impulses that his brother can only verbalize. He begins to
lead a secret life of pornographic movies and Big Macs nibbled on the Sabbath. After
he is caught shoplifting at a department store, he is sent to a yeshiva in
Israel that specializes in returning wayward sons to the faith. Although he is tempted towards living a more righteous
life by a beautiful Orthodox daughter, his main accomplishment in the Holy Land
is scoring hashish from Arab drug dealers.
The
best parts of the book are in the beginning, when we are thrust into the rigid
and frequently absurd world of the upstate Hasidic community. Shalom is all
but twisted into knots by the increasingly arcane rules of behavior. As a
student, he participates in a weekly Blessing Bee, where he is required to
determine the proper blessing for ice cream placed on a sugar cone. The
students at the yeshiva are afraid to swear because they are warned that in the
afterlife they will be hung by their tongues for all the foul words uttered.
Yet there is no explicit prohibition to stop an older boy from holding down the
younger ones and grabbing their testicles. Since it is better to have your
balls squeezed a bit in this world than to have your tongue ripped out in the
next, the children keep quiet and accept their torment.
In
these early sections of the book, Auslander writes with the kind of raging
humor you might associate with Philip Roth. As the book progresses, though, the
reader feels a kind of despair that not even Portnoy had to wrestle with. Much
like the bible, Foreskin’s Lament is
not a book that promises cheap or easy liberation. Even after marrying a
suitable companion and making a final break from the religious community, Auslander
cannot get out from under the worldview of his childhood. He still believes in
a God formed in his father’s image: a petty tyrant who delights in meting out
punishment.
Auslander does not
reject the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Instead he rejects the idea that
this God is worthy of being dignified through our devotion. Auslander’s one
consolation, which he indulges in throughout the book, is to offer his honest
response to this awful deity’s demands. When faced with divine retribution for
his decision to live on his own terms, Auslander looks from the sky to his
keyboard and types his most honest response to the God who has created his
world: fuck you.
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