Dark Coffee, Bright Light and the Paradoxes of Omnipotence
by
Ben Burgis
Avi realized with moments to spare that the coffee house was about to go up in flames.
He'd been sitting alone at a table by the window, sipping strong sweet Arabic coffee from a tiny ceramic cup and trying to grade a pile of "Intro to Philosophy" papers, when the man in the trench coat came in off the street. This guy would have caught Avi's attention anyway, if only because he was the only other Jew in the trendy East Jerusalem café.
A Sephardic Jew who could afford the pricy designer jeans below that trench coat was hard to tell from a Palestinian, but there was a colorful, hand-knit yarmulke poking out from underneath the man’s baseball cap. That identified him as being not only a Jew, but an observant Jew, and of the "national-religious" variety at that.
Avi was close enough to him to see the man's face was glowing with sweat, his eyes dilated with excitement. If Avi had been more paranoid by nature, he would have been able to take those physical details, and the sheer improbability of that kind of Jew stopping in a place like this for a cup of coffee, and deduce the nature of the object lurking beneath the trench coat.
He didn't, not until the man opened his mouth and began to very softly recite the Shema, the last prayer a devout Jew utters before he dies.
"Shema Yisroel …" Hear, Oh Israel …
Avi spat out his mouthful of dark coffee and got to his feet.
"Adonai Eloheinu …" The Lord is our God …
"Get the fuck out of here!" Avi shouted as loud as he could in his Hebrew-accented Arabic. He earned stares of incomprehension from the other patrons.
"Adonai …" The Lord …
Avi barreled past the bomber so fast that he went right past the sidewalk and fell onto the street in a heap. Cars swerved around him. Horns honked. He threw his hands over his head.
"… Ehad." …is one.
Avi didn't actually hear the last word or see the man open up his trench coat and pull the string, but he felt the reverberations as the glass in the windows shattered and flames licked out onto the sidewalk.
From where he sat, covering his head with his hands, Avi could only see a momentary impression of bright light in the periphery of his vision. As he rocked back and forth on the baking pavement of that Jerusalem street, his ears ringing with the roar of silence, Avi mouthed "Baruch Hashem," a quick thoughtless prayer of thanks, to a God in which he had long since ceased to believe, for the kindness of sparing his life.
Avi lost his religion fifteen years earlier, a few weeks before his thirteenth birthday.
Of course, he hadn't had all that much faith to lose. His parents had both spent their childhoods on a secular kibbutz before the Twelve-Day War of 1967 put an end to that experiment in collective farming. The Jordanians, and later their 'independent' Palestinian client state, argued that they were simply restoring refugees to their lawful homes, but Avi knew that was bullshit. His grandparents' generation of Zionists had drained the swamp where that kibbutz was built. Any Arabs who'd lived there before '48 must have been very good swimmers.
The net effect was that, along with hundreds of thousands of other refugees from the countryside, Avi's parents had raised him and his brother David in the over-crowded city centre of Tel Aviv, at the heart of what the Palestinian authorities called the "the Jewish Autonomy Zone" and the embittered residents called "the shtetl" or sometimes "the world’s biggest fucking prison camp." An awful lot of those residents, faced with a regime of identity cards and house-to-house weapons searches, deadly air strikes on "suspected Jewish Underground militants" and a thousand daily humiliations in what for nineteen glorious years had been their own country, found comfort in a return to the faith of their fathers.
Avi's mother was one of the ba'al teshuvim, the newly devout. His father was not. The uneasy compromise was a kosher kitchen with two sets of plates and dishes to become dirtied by his father's cooking on Yom Kippur, Shabbat meals in front of the television as the family cheered for their teams in Friday night soccer games and religious training for both of the boys until they reached the age of thirteen, at which point they would be allowed to choose for themselves.
Avi and David dutifully joined a couple of dozen other neighborhood boys after school twice a week to study Torah and Talmud in pairs as an old Rabbi with a gray beard and a broad-rimmed black hat paced back and forth to yell at them in his own pidgin of Yiddish, Russian and Hebrew. In later years, some of Avi's more liberal-minded Palestinian friends in grad school at Al-Quds University asked him if the intellectual rigors of that kind of study, all those commentaries and commentaries on commentaries, had been a good preparation for his later interest in analytic philosophy.
He'd always told them that they weren’t, certainly not as much as a good course in Calculus or Physics would have been, but that his real philosophical training had begun on the day he'd been kicked out. He'd been paired with a dark-eyed Sephardic boy whose name he subsequently forgot, but whose soft olive complexion lingered in his memory. At the time, Avi was too confused to really understand much about his fascination with the boy or his own nascent bisexuality. He'd just known that he liked to spar about tricky Talmudic passages with him, teasing out subtly heretical interpretations for the joy of seeing the faint blush on the other boy's cheek.
It was in the middle of just such an exchange, about a particularly bizarre Talmudic reference to "demons" infesting abandoned buildings, that the Rabbi had stopped in his usual exhortations to the room at large to stare incredulously at them. For just a moment, time stopped. Every detail of the room, the brown paint peeling from its walls and the pervasive smell of the cheap clove cigarettes the Rabbi smoked every day before class, imprinted itself on Avi's mind.
In his own personal mythology, the event later came to resemble something in between Socrates being forced to drink poison by the Athenian court and Martin Luther's rebuke to the Papal authorities at the Diet of Worms. The truth was that at the time Avi's chief concern had been his irrational certainty that the Rabbi had read his mind, that he knew what sort of thoughts Avi was having about the Sephardic boy. That, more than anything, fueled his attempt at coolly arrogant defiance. "I said," Avi repeated, "that it has to be metaphorical. Someone as smart as Maimonides must have known that there aren't really any demons."
The Rabbi demanded in a shaky voice to know why God couldn’t have created demons, Avi muttered something about science and the Rabbi started shouting. "Hashem separated the light from the darkness! He can do anything!"
The room was in a hush, only David smirking as he tried to contain his hilarity at the way his big brother was taking the piss out of the old Rabbi. The Sephardic boy looked like he wanted to crawl under his desk.
Avi stuck a finger at the old wooden door at the front of the room, the one that no one could ever quite close. "Could Hashem make it so that door was always closed instead of always open?"
"Da," the Rabbi answered.
Avi took a second to remember that “da” was "yes" in Russian, then he plunged forward. "Could he make it so no one could open it?"
"Da."
"Could he make it so He Himself couldn't open it?"
The Rabbi sputtered and started quoting poetic passages from the psalms about the power and majesty of God. David started laughing. Avi smirked. "It's a simple question. Yes or no. Which is it?"
He never got his answer.
Six days before his twenty-eighth birthday, Avi found himself back in Tel Aviv, writing on the chalkboard of a Junior College classroom that could have been the twin brother of the classroom in which his atheism had been born fifteen years before. The peeling paint was orange instead of brown, and no clove cigarettes covered the smell of the kosher butchery next door, but the two rooms were of a type, right down to doors that didn't quite close.
By all rights, Avi should be teaching in Palestine proper, not the backwater of the Jewish Autonomy Zone. Not only were the classes he'd TA'ed while he was getting his PhD wildly popular, he'd had papers published in symbolic logic journals in both Palestine and the United States. Everyone agreed he was one of the brightest students in the Department.
None of that mattered. After the wave of suicide bombings that had rocked Jerusalem on the anniversary of the 12-Day War, the Temporary Autonomy Zone Co-Authority was in no mood to renew the educational travel visa of a philosopher whose kid brother had spent time in prison as a suspected Jewish Underground agitator. The campus liberals at Al-Quds had made a fuss on Avi's behalf, but at the end of the day, here he was, trying to teach modal logic to about two dozen bored students who could barely follow lectures in Arabic.
The chalk board was full of logical formulas prefaced with diamond-shaped possibility operators and square-shaped necessity operators. An Ashkenazi boy in his twenties, a hand-knit purple yarmulke pinned to his thick brown hair, was standing up at his desk, trying to translate the formula Avi had circled from the symbolism into ordinary talk. His skin was a few shades too light to be exactly Avi's usual taste, but "Dr. Cohen" still had to remind himself not to stare at the boy. What you could get away with in cosmopolitan East Jerusalem was very different from the way things were back home.
"It says that it's possible that it's necessary that…"
"Necessary that it's possible that," Avi corrected.
"Right. Necessary that it's possible that the Morning Star and the Evening Star are not identical."
Avi nodded encouragingly, and took a sip of sludgy black coffee from his travel mug before he responded. Sarah, sitting in the front row, smirked at that. Avi ignored her. "Good. Now what does that mean?"
The student started to repeat himself, and Avi cut him off. "What I mean is what would it mean for the Morning Star to fail to be identical to the Evening Star? Remember, we said that 'necessary' means that it's true in all possible worlds, and 'possible' means that it's true in at least one possible world."
The student tried the same line a third time, but with "necessary" replaced with "in all possible worlds." Avi cut him off, told him to sit back down and started writing the names of books and authors on the chalkboard. One was "Identity and Necessity" by Saul Kripke. Some of students in the back briefly perked up in interest when Avi mentioned that Kripke was an American Jew, but leaned back in their seats when they realized that "Identity and Necessity" had nothing to do with politics. They couldn't use it as an opportunity to bait Dr. Cohen into yet another round of the endless off-topic argument about whether violence was justified in "the struggle against the Arab aggressors."
The other book was "Counterfactuals" by an Australian philosopher named David Lewis. Avi explained that Kripke saw possible worlds as a metaphor, whereas Lewis believed that alternate worlds literally existed, one for every possible state of affairs. Since two people in different spatio-temporal worlds couldn't literally be "identical," possibility-statements really referred to the actions of your 'counterpart' in that other world. "So, for example, if I say that it is possible that Rebecca"—the redhead giggled and squirmed in her seat like she always did when she was used in an example, and behind her Sarah rolled her eyes like she always did when Rebecca acted that way—"might have lived in Sefad instead of here if we'd won the 12-Day War, according to David Lewis, what I really mean is that in the closest possible world where that happened—I mean, the one that most resembles our world despite that difference—the inhabitant of that world who is most similar to Rebecca lives in Sefad."
The student in the purple yarmulke seized the conversational opening. "In that world, are the Arabs willing to treat us like human beings?"
Avi sighed, took a sip of his strong sweet coffee, and decided to stop fighting the drift of the conversation. "Maybe. Or maybe in that world they have it just as bad as we do in this one. Maybe they're even desperate enough to use dumb, counter-productive tactics like suicide bombings."
Avi leaned back on his desk and finished his coffee as his students interrupted each other in their angry responses, resigned to the fact that even in the most distant possible worlds, his counterparts weren't going to be able to steer the conversation back to modal logic before the end of the hour.
David, to his credit, laughed when Avi relayed that line the next night over Shabbat dinner conversation with him and his wife Sarah.
The couple's combined salary was almost nothing, since Sarah was living off of student loans and David's security level made him almost completely ineligible for legal employment in the Autonomy Zone, but they always managed to put together an amazing dinner. With the plates of steaming chicken, challah and baked noodle kugel, the intricately decorated table cloth and the faux-silver Shabbat candles, they'd created an atmosphere that made it well worth sitting through the prayers—Avi drew the line at saying them—and having to argue about politics the whole time.
"That's good," David said, "but you really do have to be more careful than that."
Sarah ladled more chicken onto Avi's plate. He smiled up at her. "Hey, if known terrorist elements like you still want me over for dinner, I figure I can't be saying anything that bad."
David smirked at the Co-Authority-speak. "Sure, but even if I really was involved in the JU's military wing, which I never have been"—he made a comical show of looking around for Co-Authority spy cameras—"I'd still agree with your point. The JU hasn't engaged in martyrdom operations for ten years, and we've encouraged the other factions to stop. 'Suicide bombings' are stupid."
Avi put down his fork and stared his brother in the eye. "And there's such a big difference between that and roadside bombs, right? Enough of those and we'll get our independence back for sure."
The smirk didn’t leave David's face, but his eyes went cold. "There's a huge difference. You can leave a roadside bomb and live to build another one the next day."
"… and since doing it for forty years has been so wildly successful in breaking the will of the occupiers, maybe we should just try the same fucking thing for forty more.”
Sarah slammed her wine glass on the table. If it had been made of real glass instead of reinforced plastic, it probably would have shattered. Her usual cheerful expression was replaced with a deep flush that reduced both her husband and her Intro to Philosophy professor to silence.
"Avi," she finally said. "Why don't you tell David about modal logic?"
Avi began to re-gain his religion five days later, on his twenty-eighth birthday.
He taught at the Junior College that night, and left the class proud that he'd been able to spend nearly the whole hour on-topic. He was going to go to Sarah and David's—it belatedly occurred to him to wonder why Sarah had skipped class that night—for a bottle of black market scotch David had been bragging about.
When he stepped out into the dry heat of the September night, everything had changed.
By the time Avi had unlocked his bicycle from the lamppost, he’d realized that the streets were deserted. He could hear the moan of ambulance sirens in the distance. He biked for five minutes without seeing a single car. When he finally saw one, it was a lime green, open-back truck full of Palestine Defense Forces soldiers.
It screeched to a halt when he biked by. Two soldiers, identical looking except for a few inches difference in height and the thick glasses one of them wore perched on his nose, jumped out and started screaming in Arabic with thick Galilean accents. They pointed their sleek black assault rifles at Avi, and for a horrible second he thought he would piss his pants.
Following their instructions, Avi abandoned his bike and sank to his knees, his hands cupped behind his head. He asked—first, unthinkingly, in Hebrew, and then in Arabic—what had happened. The taller of the two soldiers, the one with the glasses, swung the rifle to smash Avi's jaw.
Avi's field of vision filled with red spots.
As soon as his identity card had pinned him as a blood relation of one of the "known terrorist leaders," another rifle swing knocked Avi unconscious.
Moments before, he finally made out the two words the soldier was repeating over and over again, "Arafat" and "dead."
The Jewish Underground had assassinated the Prime Minister.
He woke up in a four-by-four foot detention cell, which he shared with two other detainees. They smoked and speculated about the news and once or twice a day each of them was pulled out for interrogation.
At first, Avi thought that they were interrogating him because they thought he might know something. He was well aware of the Palestinian Supreme Court's ruling that "coercive interrogation" was justified in suspected terrorism cases, and he’d heard the horror stories, but he honestly thought that anything they did to him would be about extracting information.
It wasn't. It was about the commander—Mahmud something-or-other—working out his anger issues about terrorism, about the way Jews smelled, and just how shitty he found service in godforsaken places like Tel Aviv. His favored methods of therapy were a lit cigarillo, a pair of pliers and a bucket of stagnant water.
During his third session in the back room, Avi came up from the bucket of water angry enough to respond out of turn. "You said that if 'the Jews' stopped blowing themselves up, you wouldn't have to be stationed here. There are two problems there. I'd think that in the closest possible worlds …"
Responding to a nod from the commander, the two PDF soldiers holding his head dunked it back in the water.
It took Avi almost thirty seconds to get his voice back. "… in which you never occupied us in the first place, there wouldn't be any suicide bombings."
Mahmud nodded again, and Avi was back in the water. When he got back out, he had to take several ragged breaths before continuing. "The second problem is the scope of that phrase, 'the Jews.' If all Jews blew themselves up, there would be no one to occupy. Maybe if you took a Deductive Logic class…"
That was the day Mahmud introduced the pliers.
Back in the cell, Avi got to know his two fellow inmates very well. Ehud was an agnostic, and Gershom was extremely religious, so there was some conversation there in between the endless guesswork about current events. By the second day, Gershom and Ehud both knew all the standard philosophical arguments for and against the existence of God backwards and forwards. Gershom surprised and delighted Avi by being a good student and coming up with all sorts of clever objections and counter-arguments.
Gershom started demanding a Siddur for his daily prayers in his interrogation sessions, and the guards eventually gave him one. They put it in the shared toilet in the back of the cell.
Gershom grimly fished the prayer book out of the toilet bowl, left it out to dry on the floor for a day, separated the pages and began to use it. They couldn't say the prayers that required a minyan, but Ehud and Avi immediately and unquestioningly joined in the chanting every morning as a matter of solidarity. As soon as that was over, they would re-start the argument about the existence of God.
Once Avi was missing two of the fingernails on his right hand and one of the ones on the left, he pretty much figured the worst of the "interrogation" was over. He was wrong.
His little outburst about logic had resulted in a new line of verbal abuse, this one revolving around Mahmud's contention that Avi "talked like a fucking queer." The day before he was released, Mahmud told his two confederates to leave the room and announced with great pride that he'd talked to some people who'd met Avi at Al Quds. "Turns out you don't just talk like one."
If Avi had been less addled by the days of "interrogation" and sleep in the constant bright light of the detention cell, he might have had some idea of where Mahmud was going with this before the commander unzipped his pants.
"I guess that means you won't even mind this, will you?"
When Avi was dumped back onto the streets at the end of the week, his first visit was to Sarah and David's apartment. He had to fight down vomit when he saw the bruises covering Sarah’s face and neck, but he forced himself to be relieved that she was in one piece and not in a detention cell herself.
Sarah hugged him, hard, until he winced and she pulled back. She invited him in and held it together long enough to get him a cup of coffee. She didn't even start crying until he asked whether David was still in detention.
Avi was a coffin bearer at his brother's funeral, and from then on he attended the minyan at Gershom’s shul three times a day, praying with an intensity and devotion that rivaled the Rabbi's. He went through the motions of teaching his class for the remainder of the semester—his new Rabbi had reminded him, after all, of the importance of honoring contracts—and went to services on the last Friday of the school year with his new intention fully formed.
He had discussed it with the Rabbi, who was a member of the “Real JU” splinter faction, and he was far from surprised when the topic of that night's sermon was the biblical story of Samson.
"Samson said, 'Let me die with the Philistines!’ and pulled the temple down around those wicked men. This was a great mitzvah, and Samson was a hero of the Jewish people." The Rabbi stared straight into Avi's eyes as he said that part. For a moment, there seemed to be a flame dancing in the Rabbi's glasses as pure and bright as the verses of the law, inscribed according to tradition in black fire on white fire in the mind of God.
Avi nodded, and his heart lifted in joy. He wept as he sang the prayer about the resurrection of the dead. When the Torah scroll was passed around the congregation, Avi was the first to kiss it.
As he climbed the hill to the PDF checkpoint on the border of the neighborhood the next morning and waited for the civilians to pass through, Avi reflected that he still didn't know whether an all-powerful being could create a door that He Himself could not open. He was, however, no longer bothered by the question.
He got to the checkpoint and began to whisper, suffused with the happy knowledge that in a few minutes all of the cards would be turned over, all of his questions answered, as his body was transfigured into a pillar of light.
"Shema, Yisroel ...”
Ben Burgis is a PhD candidate in the Philosophy Department at the University of Miami, and a low-residency MFA student at the University of Southern Maine (Stonecoast). His dissertation is about the problem of how we can be sure that reality itself is logically consistent, and his academic thesis for his MFA is about the religious experiences of Philip K. Dick. Those two issues strike him as being, in some strange way, closely related to each other. In any case, an interview with him, and a condensed version of his story 'Sing, Goddess, Sing Me To The Stars' appeared in Episode 25 of the Diet Soap Podcast (a full version is available here), and his short story "Five Weird Things" is forthcoming at the StarShip Sofa podcast. He blogs at Horselover Fat.
