He walks with me, and he talks with me
He tells me that I am his own.
And the joy we share, as we tarry there,
None other has ever known.
The words came to him on the breeze from down the prison yard, and they seemed sweet, like the breeze. The words seemed natural, as the discovery of some previously unsuspected force, some force which underlay the conscious world, and moved it.
Like the force of love, as it’s discovered to an adolescent.
Or the force of fatherhood, where one says, “Now. Ah. Now I understand”—Where so much unclear becomes clear, and we see understanding is not a reordering of opposites in the mind but the clarification of apparent contradiction into simplicity.
“Yes,” he thought. “Clean as the breeze and fecund like the breeze. Like the spring field: the notion one is saved—that one has but to embrace salvation and one is saved.”
But the fallacy—the Rabbi had said—lay in this: One cannot award oneself salvation. The joy one feels in doing so comes from usurpation of the power of God.
In linking salvation—whatever that might be—to faith, one sets oneself the simplest of tasks and, upon its completion, awards oneself Godhood. Of course that feels good. “How could that feel otherwise than good?” the Rabbi said. To have illicit sex, or rape, or murder, sanctioned by Authority, that felt good too. “Any idolatry,” the Rabbi said, “that is the force which sent you here.”
These saved folk have been convened these two thousand years to kill and hate and call it good.
Of course they’re wedded to it. What savage ever denominated his barbarity other than Reason?
“Of course it feels good,” the Rabbi said.
“And tell the drunkard his vileness is a religion, and the dope fiend his lack of control is blessed. …” He paused.
“We do not know what is right.” the Rabbi said. “We are incompetent to distinguish it. Our eyes lead us astray. Our heart leads us astray. That is why we are bonded to follow the mitzvot: what else do we have? The delusion of comprehension, which leads us to proclaim we are God.
“We understand nothing.”
“Of course you’re drawn to their songs,” Frank thought. “You fool.”
“And so drawn to the singers of the songs, and their supposed ‘community.’
“And do you think they would have you if you embraced them? You are an object of scorn. Why? Why? It is not for you to say. Do you hear? It is not for you to say.
“Stand guiltless before God—to the extent you can—and let the Christians behave as they will. You cannot stop them.
“You cannot join them. Why would you want to?
“Study, live, and die.”
But the song came through the window: “I walk in the Garden alone …”
“To be a man,” the Rabbi said, was to behave as a man in that situation where there were neither the trappings nor the rewards of manhood: scorned, reviled, abandoned, humiliated, powerless, terrified, mocked.
“Now be a man …” the Rabbi said.
The song came through the window. and as he denominated it strength to resist it, to that extent he felt strong.