Complete Science Fiction 01 Immodest Proposals, page 93
part #1 of Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Series
“Why can’t you be Jews? Because,” says the Committee Chairman, stuttering with wet lips and plucking at the air with his right hand, “because Jews can be this, can be that. They can be a lot of things. But, first of all, they have to be human.”
“You will kindly point out to us,” the Bulbas say through my son, the interpreter, “where it says and in which book that Jews have to be human. Name an authority, provide a quotation.”
At this point the Deputy Chairman comes up and apologizes to the Chairman of the Committee. The Deputy Chairman is the kind who wins scholarships and fellowships. “You’ll pardon me,” he says, “but you’re not making it clear. It’s a very simple matter, really.” He turns to the Bulbas. “No one can be a Jew,” he explains to the six of them, “who is not the child of a Jewish mother. That’s the most ancient, most fundamental definition of a Jew.”
“Aha,” say the Bulbas. “And from what do you get the impression that we are not the children of Jewish mothers? Will you settle for the copies of our birth certificates that we brought along with us?”
That’s when the meeting falls apart. A bunch of delegates in khakis starts cheering and stamping their feet. Another bunch with fur hats and long earlocks begins screaming that this whole colloquy is an abomination. All over the hall arguments break out, little clusters of argument between two and three people, big clusters of argument between twenty and thirty people, arguments on biology, on history, on the Baba M’tziya. The man sitting next to me, a fat, squinty-eyed man to whom I haven’t said a word, suddenly turns to me and pushes his forefinger into my chest and says: “But if you take that position, my dear fellow, how in the world can you make it compatible with the well-known decision, to mention just one example—” And up on the platform, Bronsteinite Trotskyists have seized control of the public-address system and are trying to reintroduce their resolution on Uganda and Rhodesia.
By the time some kind of order is restored, two blue Jews have been carried away to the hospital and a lawyer from Ganymede has been arrested for using a hearing aid as a deadly weapon.
Someone calls for a vote, by the entire Congress, on the accreditation of the Bulbas. Accreditation as what—someone else wants to know—as delegates or as Jews? They’ve been accepted as delegates, and who are we to pass upon them as Jews? I’ll accept them as Jews in the religious sense, someone else stands up to point out, but not in the biological sense. What kind of biological sense, he’s asked by a delegate from across the hall; you don’t mean biology, you mean race, you racist. All right, all right, cries out a little man who’s sitting in front of him, but would you want your sister to marry one?
It’s obvious that there are as many opinions as there are delegates. And the chairman, up there on the platform, he’s standing there and he doesn’t know what to do.
Suddenly I notice one of the Bulbas is climbing up on the platform. These little tentacles, they use them for everything, for walking, for eating, for talking, for I don’t know what. And this Bulba, he gets to the public-address system, and he vibrates one short tentacle for a while, and finally we hear what he says, faint and very soft. We hear that funny voice, like a piece of paper rustling, all through the hall:
“Modeh ani l’fonecha.”
The line, just translated by itself, may not mean so much—“Here I am standing before you” or “I present myself before you”—but what Jew, even with only a fingernail’s worth of religious background, could not be moved by it, delivered in such a way and at such a time? Modeh ani l’fonecha, the Jew says in the prayer, when he is directly addressing God, blessed be His Name. And that’s what we all of us now hear in the hall.
Don’t talk to me about race, the Bulba is actually saying, don’t talk to me about religion, don’t talk to me about any legal or philosophical technicalities. I claim that I am a Jew, whatever a Jew is, essentially and spiritually. As Jews, do you accept me or reject me?
No one can answer.
Of course, all this is not getting the Congress any closer to Israel, to a return from the Third Exile. But it’s obvious on the one hand that the matter can’t be put on the table, and it’s obvious on the other hand that it can’t be taken off the table. This is not quite the kind of pilpul that our learned ancestors had to deal with. We have to find out: what is a Space Age Jew?
So, by general agreement it is decided that as Moses smote the rock to get water, we’re going to smite a High Rabbinical Court to get wisdom.
A High Rabbinical Court is appointed by the Accreditation Committee. It has the kind of membership that will satisfy everybody at least a little bit, even if it means that the members of the Court won’t want to talk to each other. You know, a kind of kosher smorgasbord. There’s the rabbi his followers call the Gaon of Tau Ceti. There’s the president of the Unitarian Jewish Theological Seminary. There’s the Borneo Mystic Rabbi. There’s a member of the chalutziot rabbinate, with his bare chest and rolled-up sleeves. And so on, and so on. There are two women rabbis, one to satisfy the majority Reconstructionist sect, and the other to keep the Miami Ashkenazim happy. And finally, because this is Venus, there’s a rabbi from Venus: Rabbi Joseph Smallman.
You want to know something? It’s not only because he’s from Venus, no matter what the Committee Chairman says. The Bulbas have been insisting that they’re entitled to a rabbi who in some way will represent them, and suddenly they want that to be Rabbi Smallman. I can tell what’s going on from where I sit, I can see my son with his big mop of black hair going from one Bulba to another, arguing, explaining, urging. He’s talking them into it, that Aaron David of mine. He’s become the floor manager at the nominating convention of a political party.
“We did it!” he says to me that night in the apartment. His eyes are dancing like meteors. “We got Rabbi Smallman on the Rabbinical Court.”
I try to calm him down. “That by itself is not yet the equivalent of crossing the Red Sea on dry land, or of the oil which renewed itself night after night. Just because Rabbi Smallman can push a black hair into a dent, you think he can push Jews into accepting six lumpy brown pillows as fellow Jews?”
“He can if anyone can.”
“And if anyone can, why should he? Why should he even try to do such a thing?”
My son gave me the kind of look you give a doctor who tells you he wants to spray disease germs at the electric fan. “Why, Papa! For the sake of justice.”
When a son makes a father feel ashamed of himself, the father has a right to feel proud too. I sat down in a corner of the kitchen while Aaron David went into the bathroom to hold a consultation with his brown Bulbas.
But let me tell you, I also felt sad. The wisdom of The Preacher I don’t quite have, but one thing I’ve learned. Whenever someone uses the word “justice,” sooner or later there’s going to be a split head or a broken heart.
From that day on, every free second I had, I rushed off to Decatur Burrow to attend the sessions of the High Rabbinical Court. Sylvia found out about it and my life was not easy. “While you’re studying this new trade, you and that son of yours,” she said, “someone’s got to work at the old one. You’ll be a judge, he’ll be a district attorney, so I’ll have to be the TV man. Give me a pair of pliers and the Index to the Printed Circuits, and I’ll go out and make a living.”
“Woman,” I told her, “I’m doing my work and my son’s work, and I’m keeping food on the table. If the customers don’t complain, why should you? I don’t get drunk, I don’t take drugs. I’m entitled to nourish my spirit at the feet of scholars and wise men.”
Sylvia looked up at the ceiling and clasped her hands together. “He can’t nourish first a couple of daughters-in-law into the house?” she asked the ceiling. “That’s a procedure that is specifically forbidden by the holy books?”
No, my life was not easy. Why should I tell you otherwise?
But what was going on in the Decatur Burrow was so interesting I could hardly sit still while I listened to it. It was like a legend had come to life, it was like watching the golem taking a stroll one day in downtown Prague, it was like coming across the River Sabbathion and seeing it boil and bubble and throw up stones every day in the week but Saturday. Such history as the Bulbas told the Rabbinical Court!
They’d come to the fourth planet of the star Rigel maybe seven, eight hundred years ago in one of the first star ships. Originally, they had been a small orthodox community living in Paramus, New Jersey, and the whole community had been expelled to make way for a new approach to the George Washington Bridge. So they had to go somewhere, right? So why not Rigel? In those days a trip to another solar system took almost a whole lifetime, children were born on the way, people had to live, you know, close. The star ship foundations were advertising for people who already got along with each other, who were living in groups—political groups, religious groups, village groups. The Paramus, New Jersey, people weren’t the only ones who went out in a star ship looking for a quiet place where they’d be left alone. That’s how the galaxy came to be so full of Amish and Mennonites, Black Muslims and Bangladesh intellectuals, and these old-fashioned polygamous Mormons who spit three times when you mention Salt Lake City.
The only trouble was that the one halfway comfortable planet in the Rigel system already had an intelligent race living on it, a race of brown creatures with short gray tentacles who called themselves Bulbas. They were mostly peasants living off the land, and they’d just begun their industrial revolution. They had at most a small factory here, a mill or two, and a small smelting plant there. The Jews from Paramus, New Jersey, had been hoping for a planet all to themselves, but the Bulbas made them so welcome, the Bulbas wanted them so much to settle on their planet and bring in trade with the rest of the galaxy, that they looked at each other and they said, why not?
So the Jews settled there. They built a small commercial spaceport, and they built houses, and they fixed up a shul and a heder and a teenage recreation center. Nu, they called the place home.
At this point in the story, one of the rabbinical judges leaned forward and interrupted. “But while this was going on, you looked like Jews? I mean, the kind of Jews we’re familiar with?”
“Well, more or less. What we looked like particularly, we understand, was Jews from New Jersey.”
“That’s close enough. Continue.”
For a hundred, a hundred and fifty years, there was happiness and prosperity. The Jews thrived, the Bulbas thrived, and there was peace between them. But you know what Isaac Leib Peretz says about the town of Tzachnovka? “It hangs by nothing.” Every Jewish community, everywhere, hangs by nothing. And, unfortunately, nothing is not so strong. Sooner or later it gives way.
With the Jews to help them, the Bulbas began to become important. They built more factories, more smelting plants, they built banks and computer centers and automobile junkyards. They began to have big wars, big depressions, big political dictatorships. And they began to wonder why they were having them.
Is there any other answer to such a question? There’s only one answer. The Jews, naturally. Philosophers and rabble-rousers pointed out that before the Jews came there’d been no such trouble. The Jews were responsible for everything. So Rigel IV had its first pogrom.
And after the government had apologized, and helped the Jews to bury their dead, and even offered to pay for some repairs, twenty or thirty years later there was a second pogrom. And then there was a third pogrom, and a fourth pogrom. By this time, the government was no longer apologizing, and it was the Jews who were paying for repairs.
Now there came ghettos, there came barring from certain occupations, there even came, from time to time, concentration camps. Not that it was all terrible: there were pleasant interludes. A government of murderers would be followed by a halfway decent government, a government, say, of just maimers. The Jews sank into the position of the Jews who lived in Yemen and Morocco a thousand years ago, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They did the dirtiest, most poorly paid work of all. Everybody spit at them, and they spit at themselves.
But Jews they remained. They continued their religious studies, even though, on the whole planet by this time, there was not one set of the Talmud without missing books, there was not one Torah scroll without empty spaces. And the centuries went by, and they knew wars and tyrannies, devastations and exterminations. Until recently, when a new, enlightened government had come to power over all of Rigel IV. It had restored citizenship to the Jews and allowed them to send a delegation to the Neozionist Congress.
The only trouble was that by this time, after all they’d been through, they looked like just plain Bulbas. And they looked like the weakest, poorest Bulbas of all, Bulbas of the very lowest class.
But in the past couple of months they’d learned that this sort of thing had happened to other Jews, in other places. Jews tended to blend into their environment. After all, hadn’t there been blonde Jews in Germany, redheaded Jews in Russia, black Jews—the Falashas—in Ethiopia, tall Mountain Jews in the Caucasus who had been as fine horsemen and marksmen as their neighbors? Hadn’t there been Jews who had settled in China far back in the Han Dynasty and who were known in the land as the “T’ai Chin Chiao”? What about the blue Jews sitting in this very Congress? And for that matter—
Another interruption. “These are normal physiological changes that can be explained on a reasonable genetic basis.”
If it’s possible for a brown cushion with short gray tentacles to look shocked, this brown cushion with short gray tentacles looked shocked. “Are you suggesting that such Jews—the Chinese Jews, the Russian Jews—intermarried and were allowed to remain within the congregation?”
“No, but there are other possibilities. Rape, for example.”
“So much rape? Again and again?”
The judges muttered to each other uncomfortably. Then:
“In other words, despite your appearance, you are asking us to believe that you are Jews, and not Bulbas?”
The brown cushion stretched forward with all of its tentacles. “No, we are asking you to believe that we are Bulbas. Jewish Bulbas.”
And it explained about the genealogical charts it was offering in evidence. The most prized possession of every Jewish family on Rigel IV was its genealogical chart. These records had been preserved intact through fires and wars and pogroms, no matter what else had been destroyed. No Jewish wedding ever took place on Rigel IV unless both parties could produce thoroughly validated genealogical charts. Through them, each Jewish Bulba could trace his ancestry back to the very first settlers on the planet.
“I, for example,” the speaker said proudly, “I, Yitzhak ben Pinchas, am the direct descendant of Melvin Cohen, the assistant manager of a supermarket in Paramus, New Jersey.”
And the argument got thicker and thicker. How is it possible, the judges wanted to know, for such tremendous changes to take place? Isn’t it more likely that at some time or another all the Jews on Rigel IV were wiped out and that then there was a mass conversion of some sort, similar to the one experienced among the Khazars of the eighth century and the Japanese later? No, said the Bulbas, if you knew what conditions have been like for Jews on Rigel IV you wouldn’t talk about mass conversions to Judaism. That would have been mass insanity. All that happened is that we began as ordinary Jews, we had a lot of trouble, a lot of time went by, and when it was all over this is what we looked like.
“But that denies the experimental facts of biology!”
The Bulbas were very reproachful. “Who are you going to believe, the experimental facts of biology—or your fellow Jews?”
And that was just the first day. I got back to my apartment and I told my brother all about it. We began discussing the case. He took one side and I took the other. In a few minutes, I was waving my fist in his face and he was screaming that I was “an idiot, an animal!” From the next room we heard the wonder-working rabbi from Procyon XII trying to quiet down a similar argument among the members of his court.
“They want to be Jews,” my brother yelled at me, “let them convert to Judaism. Then they’ll be Jews. Not before.”
“Murderer!” I said to him. “Dolt of dolts! How can they convert to Judaism when they’re already Jews? Such a conversion would be a filthy, shameful mockery!”
“Without a conversion I absolutely refuse to go up on the bima and read a portion with one of them. Without a conversion they cannot join my minyan, even if no matter where I look I can’t come up with more than nine men. Without a conversion, even if I’m celebrating a circumcision ceremony for a son—” He broke off, his eyes got suddenly calmer, more thoughtful. “How do they circumcise, do you suppose, Milchik? Where and what do they circumcise?”
“They cut off a very little bit from the tip of their shortest tentacle, Uncle Fleischik,” said my Aaron David, who’d just walked in. “It’s a fold of flesh that looks a lot like a foreskin. Besides, you know, only one drop of blood is required by the Covenant. Blood they got.”
“A new speciality,” said Sylvia as she put out the supper. “Now, God be praised and thanked, my son is a mohel.”
Aaron David kissed her. “Put my supper aside until later, Mamma. Me and the Bulbas are going to meet with Rabbi Smallman in his study.”
Let me tell you, maybe my son was no longer the interpreter since the Bulbas had found voices, but he was still their floor manager. Every day I could see him jumping from one to the other while the case was being discussed. Something special has to be looked up? They need a copy of Rov Chaim Mordecai Brecher’s Commentary on the Book of Ruth? Who goes running out of the hall to get it but my Aaron David?
After all, that turns out to be a very important issue. Ruth was a Moabite, and from her came eventually King David. And how about Ezra and the problem of the Jewish men who took Canaanite wives? And where do you fit the Samaritans in all this? Jewish women, you’ll remember, were not allowed to marry Samaritans. And what does Maimonides have to say on the subject? Maimonides is always Maimonides.
