“We all know who you are,” said Yossi, “how you reason, what you’ve said and done. But this is family. If tradition is to be served, if harmony is to reign, we must allow some measure of flexibility and....”
“Abraham is family, yet....”
“Abraham hasn’t changed.”
“Neither have I. The freedoms that sustained me then sustain me now.”
“Have no fear. You’ll not be constrained. We’ll grant you ample philosophical latitude. Of course, we hope you’ll not misuse or abuse it by spreading it indiscriminately.”
Yossi chuckled. I wasn’t amused.
“You’re full of shit. You’re granting me the freedom to hang onto to my convictions only to impose undefined limits upon them? That’s something I can’t and won’t comply with.”
“We are heir to our past. Our memories define us. Our traditions sustain us. All we ask is that you not vilify them.”
“The memories to which you cling have a way of distorting the past and encroaching on the present. You’re all so intent on preserving these petrified memories that you devise new ones as a bulwark against change. Memories? Traditions? All you’re doing is glorifying a dull, unhygienic, inconvenient, conformist, trite, unimaginative, regressive, self-righteous, stifling and antiquated past.”
Yossi was livid but said nothing.
“Give him a few days to think it over,” barked Meema. “He’ll come to his senses sooner or later.”
Néné Buby grimaced, squealed and seconded the motion.
“You have a week,” Yossi decreed. “We’re counting on you. Do not shame us by declining. Do not challenge prophecy. Let’s not quarrel with God.”
“You don’t get it, do you? You haven’t heard a word I’ve said: I'm like a top-loading washing machine: I agitate. That’s how I was built. That’s how I must function. I spoke honestly and offered cogent reasons why I should be disqualified. Instead, you’re all blinded by ideology and bent on re-staging, like automatons, what you believe to be some unalterable cosmic drama. Sooner or later, my apostasy, my intractability will be met with more than impatience or bitterness. How long before one of you, pushed to the limit, responds by putting a bullet through my head?”
“A lot of good it’d do,” Meema snickered in a low breath. “Besides, the boy has no conscience.”
My grandfather stopped buffing the barrel of his gun and looked at the others.
*
What is a conscience? Does anyone really have a notion of it that matches what it truly represents? Or are we talking about that hasty impulse that pits reason against the current? I’m not saying that we ought to live without morals. Morals are indispensable, especially in the confines of a collective existence. Humans ask themselves and each other moral questions all the time, according to their temperaments, faculties and limitations. It’s not a matter of alienating morality, of living on its fringes, but of living beyond it. Morality predates man’s codified mandates. To ponder a moral problem is to confess that one may not be innately virtuous and that therefore one must aspire to virtue in order to fill a need.
“Virtue does not render man happy,” said Spinoza, “Happiness renders man virtuous.”
You ask, “How does one become virtuous?” A better question is, “how does one become free?” I know the answer. And there are those out there who would lock me away for fear that I might blurt it out.
*
Pity the muckraker. His travail is dissonant, his art off-key, his output seldom more than the disfigured fragments of a straying spirit in search of its worldly self. He seeks neither comfort nor reward for disrobing reality. He only wants to fondle the moods and emotions he unearths as he strays along a maze strewn with pitfalls. It is the moods these metamorphoses convey, the dismay, the outrage they might possibly elicit, that makes him reach for a pen, not the urge to enlighten or entertain. He will ventilate the shadows, stir the most offensive exhalations, but he can promise no Light, impart no wisdom, deliver no eternal truth. He conforms to no particular communion. He’s afflicted with an exquisite curse: He was baptized in ink. It is in the blackness of night, where ideas incubate, that ink runs swiftest and deepest of all. I know. I’ve been swept in its ebbs and flows, never sunk, willing to risk drowning again and again with each pen stroke. The voyage is fraught with perils; the course is uncharted. It is the very nature of such journeys that compels those who embark on their diaphanous wings to ask themselves, sooner or later, whether it was wise to leave hearth and home when the old armchair felt so good, when the winds of conformity sang alluringly upon the moonlit waters of the inlet, there before them. For they are apt to discover on arrival at some uncharted port-of-call, as I did when I reached Ein Sof, that there had been no compelling reason to make the trek in the first place. For when all is said and done, at the very conclusion of their aimless peregrination, weary and confused, they will wisely conclude, as I did, that some ideals are not meant to be aimed at, let alone exceeded.