Читать книгу No One You Know - Jason Schwartzman - Страница 12

“Are you from around here?” a man asks me. One of those evangelical guys who seems to be a professional nuisance to the casual pedestrian.

I am heading to a cafe in the Arab Quarter of my neighborhood. We are not far from the local mosque, but this man seems to be Christian; he is holding a bible. I’m Jewish, so it feels like I’m stepping inside of a hammy joke. Like anyone else, I have been asked to stop a thousand times by someone like him and almost never have, but I happen to be in a good mood. I tell him I am in fact from around here: I live just down the block. There is a woman with him, but she doesn’t speak. I am expecting to hear about Jesus, but the man would like to know if I’m aware that there is a chance God may be female. He pulls open his bible to show me a passage in Genesis with a mysterious pronoun.

“Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.”

It’s that “spirit” that has the feminine pronoun. I’m intrigued by the idea of God as a woman and I loosen up a little bit, curious where else the conversation can go. I’m charmed by his progressive vision, and even when the talk tilts toward conversion, of what I am and am not, I start talking excitedly about a Torah I’ve seen recently that acknowledged some “scribal errors.” I love this phrase. The idea of these scribes copying out everything by hand – the inevitable introduction of small mistakes due to the Herculean nature of their task – each version becoming its own in minor imperceptible ways that will grow over time.

“Errors?” he says.

His voice has lost some of its music. He stares at me. The woman continues to not speak, though now her silence says something.

“Thank you for sharing this with me,” I say to him, but he is no longer listening.