Foreskin's Lament

Shalom Auslander has been trying to shake off God for most of his life. Raised during the '80s in an Orthodox Jewish community in Monsey, New York, he fled to the East Village, worked as an advertising copywriter, and violated the Sabbath to watch the New York Rangers on a Madison Square Garden Jumbotron. And yet, always anticipating some sort of divine punishment, he remained as "painfully, cripplingly, incurably, miserably religious" as ever. In Foreskin's Lament, Auslander traces the roots of his unwitting faith, evoking his God-fearing Yeshiva-bound childhood with the immediacy of a writer who is still afraid.

Auslander feared two fathers, his "Father in Heaven" and his "father on Earth," a self-loathing handyman who embarrassed his children and disappointed his wife, whose two brothers were prominent rabbis. He binged on Manischewitz Concord Grape and blush Chablis, hummed Yiddish tunes while standing alone at synagogue, yelled "Balls!" and "Cocksucker!" while he worked in the garage, and slept off his hangovers on the living room floor. When he drank, he attacked Auslander's older brother, dragging him to his bedroom "by his shirt collar," pouring "hot chicken soup onto his face and lap," and shoving the Shabbos table into his stomach "until he couldn't breathe." The favorite of the two sons, Auslander quelled his father's rage by breaking into an impersonation of Richard Nixon cribbed from "Saturday Night Live." When that was no longer effective, he resorted to spilling drinks on the Shabbos table. Later, he tried to interrupt his father's tirades with "random questions about woodworking."

Auslander never opposed his "father on Earth," but he rebelled lavishly against God. He was a prolific sinner who gorged on Slim Jims (flagrantly non-kosher sticks of meat which tasted like "pig flavored garden hose"), stuffed and duct-taped a pair of his mother's pantyhose to fashion a home-made sex doll, and, wearing tzitzis that "dangled conspicuously" from his pants and "the biggest yarmulke" he could find, strode by security guards at his local mall, his backpack and pockets stuffed with "albums, comic books, bicycle parts ... radios, portable cassette players, toy rockets, toy rocket launchers, and ... little packets of three Ritz crackers with the orange slab of non-kosher cheese." Yet, despite frivolling in illegal activity, he lacked a true rebel's confidence, and scrambled to reform whenever he fixed on something he wanted.

In fifth grade, Auslander discovered the "stone of pornography," a boulder behind his house that hid a mysteriously replenishing pile of pornographic magazines which he "studied like the Torah" on his bedroom floor. Around the same time, he noticed his classmate Deena Seigman, a girl whose "nose was a little too big" and whose eyes were "a little too close together," and succumbed to his first crush.

One day, flipping through the magazine Oui, Auslander was reminded of "Avi," short for Abraham's Hebrew name, "Avraham." A few days later, he poured lighter fluid over his entire smutty collection, convinced that pornography was his "Isaac," and that this sacrifice would win him Deena. Still bereft of Deena's attention, he ransacked the house, finding in the laundry room two magazines — Leg Show and Nugget — that he'd never seen before. Next, he broke into his parents' locked bedroom, where he discovered a copy of Penthouse under his father's bed and, under his mother's, a "small pink box" containing a vibrator and several flesh-colored attachments. He inserted his penis into one of the "large ... plastic sleeves" and promptly ejaculated for the first time.

Years later, while studying at a Yeshiva in Israel, Auslander shoved a note reading "Fuck You" into a crevice of the Wailing Wall. Struck by the possibility that God might "go fucking bat-shit when He read" it, he "rushed back," found the note, and tried "digging it out" with a pen before a soldier grabbed him by the shoulder and slammed him into the landmark.

Auslander's rabbis at the Yeshiva of Spring Valley, his elementary school, told him he would be "the next great rabbi of the Jewish people." The annual Blessing Bee — a contest in which students were asked to name the blessings associated with particular foods — provided an opportunity to prove them right and to help his mother "forget all the troubles" of their home. For days, Auslander studied a "small black booklet" called The Guide to Blessings and quizzed himself at every meal, but, in a late round, he was stumped by the question of what blessing is associated with ice cream on a cone — an especially complicated question since it involved two foods. He stalled for a moment, asking his rabbi to clarify whether the cone was wafer or sugar, then triumphantly called out an answer: "No blessing!" Why? "Because," he answered, "the room smells like doody." The Torah, Auslander explains, prohibits reciting of a blessing in the presence of feces. As he repeated his justification — "But it smells like doody!" — his rabbi dragged him outside.

In Foreskin's Lament, Auslander sometimes leaves his readers feeling much as his rabbis must have felt as they watched a smart kid goofing off. He neglects to provide any sort of intellectual context for his experience, only briefly mentioning Nietzsche and Spinoza, in the same line as National Lampoon. And though he suggests that his belief in God is buttressed by fear, the reader wonders if it's also buttressed by love. In Israel, he bought a "black hat" and "a book called The Gates of Repentance," let his "sideburns grow long" and lived devoutly for a few months. He blames this phase on loneliness; his devotion was an entrée into the homes of his rabbis. But were there also stirrings of a deeper faith? Auslander eludes any such probing. But his jokes are so good that we almost don't care.