Naphtali ben Shalom
Copyright (c) 1984 N. Borenstein. All Rights Reserved.
"Everything that lives is holy" -- William Blake"The Sabbath is the vessel that contains the soul of Judaism" -- Isaac Nissenbaum
As he did every Friday evening, Moishe Leib paused a few moments to calm his mind and soul to relative silence before the evening prayers. It was not an easy thing to do. Moishe Leib was not a wealthy man, and it was his lot to dwell with his wife and two children less than a kilometer from a consumables plant. All day long and ever through the night, sounds from the plant easily reached the small, clean cottage in which the Leib family lived, on the outskirts of Hub-spoke 1232. During the week the sound was completely blocked out by the negative-sound generators in the house's attic, but on Sabbath these machines rested, and Moishe Leib and his family had to share their Sabbath peace with the noisy Gentile factories of the hub.
The sound was particularly hard for Moishe to block out this evening because it was not alone in its devilry. Also seeking to turn him from his prayers (upon which, according to the Law, nothing less than the redemption of the world depended) was a more personal demon, a demon posing as an idea in the dangerously young mind of his son, Aryeh. Aryeh was a man in his own right, having become Bar Mitzvah on his thirteenth birthday nearly five years before. Yet he was still a boy in the ways that mattered, and he had not yet made the ancient teachings his own to the satisfaction of his pious father.
Tonight, Aryeh was away from home, gone to visit the so-called "Rebuilt" Jewish community of Ring 5, Spoke 79. Rabbi Kasowitz had counseled Moishe to let him go. "He is nearly grown, and he will be there in a few more years at most. Let him go now, when he will still return to hear what we say about what he sees." Moishe would not have dreamed of arguing with the Rabbi, but his heart was troubled at the thought of his Aryeh there among the unclean ones, eating food that was -- at great trouble -- shaped to resemble the flesh of dead animals, and allowing automatic machines, perhaps even intelligent ones, to labor on his behalf all through the Sabbath. Moishe did not see how such people could call themselves Jews, but the Rabbi said that a Jew was a Jew no matter how far he sank. Moishe Leib accepted the Rabbi's word uncritically but scarcely comprehending, for he was a simple man with no mind for theology. To him, "Rebuilt" Judaism was no different from Krishna Christianity, the dominant religion on the Aquinas.
"Baruch Atoh Adonai..." Moishe blessed the Sabbath meal his wife Leah had placed on the table -- prepared in advance, of course, and kept warm now only by the insulation of the dishes. He had to struggle to make himself aware of the familiar words, to actually bless God for his generousity and protection, as he recited the prayers too rapidly for the words themselves to be understood by any but the initiated. The meal began in silence after the prayers, until Bella ventured in her innocence to mention her absent elder brother.
"I wonder what Aryeh's doing now?" she asked, barely pausing from her industrious shoveling of the synthetic noodle kugel into her mouth. "Do they eat challah in 5-79 on Shabbat?"
Spoke 79 was laterally about as far away from home as Aryeh could have gone without a space suit, but of course Sabbath began there at the same time as it began for Moishe at Spoke 1232. But exactly when that simultaneous Sabbath should begin was a matter of bitter contention. In the absence of sunrise and sunset, nearly all of the humans of the intrastellar colony transport Aquinas set their clocks by what their computers told them was Greenwich Mean Time on Earth. To set themselves apart, Orthodox Jews all over the ship celebrated their holidays by Jerusalem Earth time, two hours later than GMT. Moishe had warned Aryeh that the progressives didn't understand why this was necessary, but now he could only wonder whether Aryeh, at 17, would assert himself to the extent of not participating in all the activities of his hosts for two hours after their celebration of the Sabbath ended. Erring in this was, Moishe told himself, wishing he could believe it, surely a minor failing -- an error in the judgment of time zones no more crucial than buying a mezuzah made on synthetic parchment rather than paper. Life was too complicated, the rules too uncertain, to regard these as more than small failings. After all, the books of Moses never mentioned time zones on a space station, so the Jews were left to disagree among themselves.
"He'll do what's right, Moishe," he heard Leah's voice. "We've got to trust him now, he's a big boy already. There, you haven't touched your vegetable soup, and I ordered it just for you! Eat, you won't help Aryeh by starving."
Moishe smiled, hearing not only Leah but also Leah's mother and his own. He ate.
One hundred twelve kilometers away, on the other side of the world, Aryeh Leib too was eating dinner. Although it was two hours later for his hosts than it was for his father, there seemed to be no hurry about anything for these "Rebuilt" Jews. They seemed nice enough, though, and it took Aryeh only a few minutes to realize that his worst fears had been groundless. He hadn't actually been told that the Rebuilt Jews were agents of Satan, but all the talk of their stupidity and lack of foresight had led him to expect at least willing acquiescence to the Evil One. Oh, he'd talked bravely at home about "needing to find out for himself," but he had secretly dreaded his first trip away from the 1200's as much as Columbus' men must have feared their voyages nearly two thousand years before. When his father had finally said that Aryeh could go, his initial euphoria lasted only a few minutes before being supplanted by the chill of fear.
But here he was, and the Cohens seemed as eager to prepare for the Sabbath as anyone he had known back home. True, they planned to leave the less intelligent machines working on the Sabbath, but the intelligent ones would be given full leisure. As for the ovens, the clocks, the recyclers, well, such creatures had neither bodies nor minds that grew weary of their lot, said Rabbi Cohen, so they no more need rest than do the planets in their orbits or the Aquinas in her centuries-old voyage.
Of course, Aryeh had been taught the answer to that argument, and he used it dutifully. "God set the planets in motion; men set the Aquinas in motion. In both cases, the work was done and the worker rested, for there is no one actively moving them now. But a machine that requires the input of new energy is doing new work, which is not permitted on the Sabbath."
Rabbi Chaim Cohen smiled in delight to hear the old arguments from the Centaurian Talmud given fresh vitality in Aryeh's young voice. The ruling had been made nearly six thousand years after the creation of the world, in a time when so many believed that the seventh "day", the day of the Messiah's return, was imminent. It was then that the holy Rabbi Rosenberg of New Seattle had issued his famous edict, renewing the Maimonidean ban on polygamy (which had officially lapsed a century earlier but which was nearly universally observed in any event) and declaring that the advent of intelligent machinery had conclusively shown the nearly-fatal error that Jewry had made in the Industrial Revolution, when automatic machinery was first permitted to work during the holy Sabbath. Of course, Rabbi Cohen could have demolished the youth's arguments in an instant, whether the boy was right or not, for he had studied nine years at one of the best yeshivot on all of Aquinas. But he had no desire to torment the boy, and so he led Aryeh gently but firmly to the conclusions the Rabbi would not permit to be missed.
"So you see, Aryeh, since the earliest machines could suffer neither pain nor exhaustion nor even boredom, the Rabbis were quite right in allowing their use on the Sabbath, as long as no Jew actively controlled its actions. Of course, we regard all men as Jews since the days of the Fourth Temple, but that merely widens the applicability of the conclusion. The problems began when the early Rabbis failed to take note of the fundamentally different nature of the thinking and feeling machines that began to be introduced during the Second Industrial Revolution. And then, overreacting as always, your Orthodox ancestors panicked the first time a servant robot was found reciting the Shema when it thought no one was looking. They declared that all machines were entitled to a Shabbat, even toasters. Anything that consumed energy, they said, deserved to rest on Shabbat. But what does the Torah say about energy? God gave the Sabbath to all creatures -- to all chai -- but he let them go on eating and burning up their fat cells, didn't he? He gave a rest from work, not from energy consumption, and work can only be done by workers. And a worker is an intelligent doer of work, not just an autotoaster."
Aryeh hadn't really been convinced of anything at all by Rabbi Cohen's words, much to his ultimate credit. Rather it was simply the confirmation of the existence of an alternative way of looking at things -- another way of being a good Jew, perhaps -- that gave Aryeh at last a convenient and apparently safe outlet for the rebelliousness he'd been stifling throughout his adolescence. It was as if he had been born to be "rebuilt." From that Sabbath onward, Aryeh Leib was a new man.
"Arnold, did you hear that?" The question was stupid, like many that his dear wife was wont to voice, for the entire noisy family at dinner -- Arnie, Essie, and their two children -- had just been silenced by an eerie, inhuman electronic wail. It took a moment's deep breathing for Arnie to formulate a coherent theory of what had happened.
"One of the robots has gone off-balance, that's all," he said, "Nothing to get alarmed about. We'll just trade in his brain to Cognitive Engineering, and they'll give us another one; they'll even fix his if they can. I'll go turn him off." Arnie Loeb spoke with the self-confidence he felt was required of a young family man, taking responsibility for his brood, but he was less than eager to confront a deranged robot for the first time. When some electrical malfunction in a robot's brain didn't paralyze the poor machine completely, it tended to plunge them into a kind of deep psychic pain that humans only dimly understood, let alone empathized with. The reaction of robots to such pain varied wildly; occasionally they became violent, which was Arnold's chief fear.
But, outside, that fear proved entirely unjustified. The robot, a none-too-bright caretaker model that kept the Leibs' home in good repair, was sitting on the ground, sobbing quietly as his employer approached him. The robot looked up at Arnie and began to speak of its own accord.
"I'm sorry I screamed like that, Mr. Leib, it just hurt so much going over the edge there -- yes, you guessed it, I'm off-balance, and the sooner you get me to a brain repairman the happier I'll be. But I'm afraid there's not much hope for this poor fellow, is there?"
At first Arnold assumed that the robot was talking only about itself, but then he noticed that it was gesturing towards a wreck of metal that seemed to have once been a toaster.
"A toaster?" asked Arnie in disbelief. "Is that what set you off, crying over a dead toaster?"
"It's been crushed almost beyond recognition, sir, just by being in the way when a transport field was coming through. It could've been me, sir. It could've been you."
This was so patently absurd that Arnie couldn't help arguing, even with a deranged manual-labor robot. "But it wasn't, was it? You know, the whole reason we wear transmitters on our necks is to steer the transports away. If toasters had brains, they'd wear them too."
"But they're sort of like my cousins, don't you see? Like monkeys are to you. And how do we really know that toasters aren't as smart as you, or at least as me, but just have no way to express themselves? I don't know sir, I just know it's terribly sad, and now my head's broken somehow and everything seems sad, and I could cry at an oil change. I need help, sir."
Arnie didn't feel even a twinge of guilt at driving to the repair shop on the Sabbath; after all, it was a mission of mercy, to end the robot's suffering, and the Lord knew Arnie had driven on Sabbath with poorer excuses than that. The robot's brain proved irreparable, but the warranty provided for replacement. Yet a certain amount of Arnie's innocence, which he thought he had disposed of entirely along with his too-Hebraic given name, was lost along with the robot's otherwise unremarkable mind. Arnie had never before believed that objects such as toasters were capable as acting for good or evil. In his study that night, he opened the pages of a book he hadn't read since leaving home, but hadn't been able to throw away.
"God is not alone when discarded by man, but man is alone." The words were attributed to Rabbi Heschel by the forgotten authors of the American Talmud. And though he'd been going to his Rebuilt Congregation weekly for years now, Aryeh, the boy Arnie had once been, felt himself suddenly alone and Godless in a relativistic world, where times and dates were matters of convenience and where thinking beings could be hurt or destroyed by carelessness, even by laxity towards inanimate objects.
Certainly a toaster turned off and put away would not have attracted a transport. Certainly an on-duty robot would have prevented the incident. Only in a Rebuilt house could this happen -- a robot rested on the Sabbath, rightly neglecting the still-functioning toaster, allowing it to die. And then it would only bother a robot, not a human, but wasn't that harm enough? Perhaps the Orthodox rules were silly, but perhaps divine guidance created them to shield believers from accidents such as these. Or perhaps the accidents were themselves punishments from God, expression of disapproval at the defiance of his Law. Perhaps the robot was right, and toasters really do suffer like men, but only in silence, when the suffering is yet worse. Arnie had lost all certainty, like a man whose daughter has died because of some misapplied lesson she'd learned at home, like only looking both ways at a three-dimensional intersection. Perhaps there were reasons for all of the Orthodox absurdities, even the inscrutable dietary laws, the laws of kashrut, which forbade not only artificial meat (common decency had outlawed the real thing for centuries now), but all manner of unnatural chemicals and ersatz foods. Perhaps eating Man's own creations, even be they simple edible proteins, was a form of spiritual cannibalism. Lacking answers or perspective, in the throes of what a detached observer might have described as his first mid-life crisis, Arnie/Aryeh resolved to visit his father, who had not spoken with or of him for thirteen years. To his family, he said only that he had to go away on important business.
"Get lost, you goyishe bum."
Aryeh hadn't expected his father to be happy to see him, and he disregarded the first reaction as inevitable. "Papa," he said to the startlingly aged man, "I came back because I saw I was wrong."
"Of course you were wrong, fool, didn't I tell you that years ago? And what did you say to your own father then, do you remember that? Go on, what did you say to the man who fed and clothed you and tried to bring you up to be a good Jew? Say it, what did you tell your father?"
"I don't remember my exact words, Papa -- "
"I'll tell you what you said! You said, Your archaic superstitions and mindless dogmas have held me in chains for twenty-two years. Henceforth I will regard them as the nonsense they are, and will regard you and your Rabbi as the fools you are. I shall go off and lead a virtuous and productive life, without the encumbrances of your outdated rituals and pointless regulations. A fine speech, one you no doubt prepared for hours, and not one I will ever forget! That is what you told your father, and the words are burned forever in my heart. So you've changed your mind, eh? You want to be a good Jew now, eh?"
"I don't know, Papa, I'm trying to find out what the truth is."
"You don't know, eh? You want to find out the truth, do you? This from a man of thirty-five, a man who should be teaching his own children the truth by now! Don't talk to me, I haven't the patience for your foolishness. Talk to Rabbi Kasowitz. "
"He's still alive?"
"No, he's dead, that's why I want you to talk to him. Go to his house and see for yourself, my idiot son. Oh, and your mother says I have to invite you back here for dinner, even if you did leave our grandchildren, who we've never even met, back at your goyishe home on spoke 78. Wear a kipah on your head or you'll get no food."
For better or for worse, Aryeh was home.