
Submissions	Subscriptions	Competition	Endowment	Contact Us

Even Satan Spoke Hebrew

By: Gilard Elbom

My brother doesn’t talk. Finished high school, went to the army, got a job at a record store. Then he stopped talking. We would sit at home, or in the car, or at his favorite bar in downtown Jerusalem, and he would just look at me, stare into my face for two, three, sometimes four hours, and not say a word. At first I thought he was trying to be the silent type, the tough, mysterious, lost-in-thought young man, oblivious to the trivialities of fellow human beings and the conventions of communication. I thought he was going through a phase. But the phase lasted much longer than I thought was necessary. Finally, when I asked him why he wouldn’t speak, he agreed to make an exception and provide an explanation.

God had given him a gift: language. God had given him many gifts. But of all the gifts bestowed on him by God, language was the best. Life was good, but it was frightening: work, food, taking care of the body, interacting with people. Sex was also good, but just as scary: the nakedness, the shame, the violence, the dehumanizing desire, the ugliness of the genitalia, the nauseating smell of sticky secretions, the confusing mixture of delight and disgust, rejuvenation and exhaustion. Death was liberating, but just as horrifying: the finitude of the flesh, the stench of the putrefying body, the violence of motionless meat, the blinding sight of blood. Only language was purely divine.

We were in the car, our father’s car, driving back from two, three, maybe four hours of silence at his favorite bar, late at night, speeding through the darkness on our way home. He wanted to drive, and I let him, even though he was drunk. He lit a cigarette. He smoked because it helped him get more girls. Girls were very easy to pick up at his favorite bar. Most of them were American tourists, young Jewish women exploring the Promised Land for the first time, discovering the beauty of the place and the people, looking for a memorable fuck with a strong Israeli soldier. Most of the guys were teenage Israeli soldiers trying to look strong.

He took the scenic route, as he used to call it, which was just his usual way of prolonging the drive before we got home and retired to our rooms. His head was cocked to the left, almost leaning against the window, no expression on his face, stubble shining in the red and green of faded traffic lights. The famous Judean Mountains in the background. It was cold. He wore his old leather jacket, collar pulled up. His silence was even more frustrating considering the fact that when he wanted, he could be very articulate.

A miracle too good for humans, language is in constant danger of corruption. We must be very careful, he said, lest we reduce it to common communication. It is through language that we know God, provided we don’t let human speech distort it. But mortal souls, thankless creatures inherently inclined to sin, are abusing language every day, downgrading its divine essence to a degenerate device contaminated by an abhorrent myriad of lexical omissions, phonetic deviations, morphological deformities, syntactic abominations, and other linguistic atrocities, failing to acknowledge the heavenly origin of the Word and our responsibility to practice extreme caution when employing it in the service of our selfish, mundane needs. The best thing, therefore, would be to leave language untouched, untainted, pure and wholesome, factory-sealed, so to speak. If we wish to live in harmony with nature, if we want to survive as a species, if we want to be blessed by God and enjoy his eternal grace, we must remember that the Word—the only tool of the trade, the only means of production, uttered by God to breathe life into the world, pronounced with the power to construct and destroy—existed before anything else, before darkness and light, before the water and the firmament, before man and woman.

He had read my book, Scream Queens of the Dead Sea, a self-referential novel about a young Israeli who, not unlike myself, insists on writing in English, betraying his homeland, national history, and mother tongue.

And if you must speak, my brother said, speak the glory of God. Praise the Almighty and return language to its celestial origin, complete the cycle with a verbal offering to the giver of speech. And don’t think that by writing books you’re completing this cycle. Speaking is bad enough, but writing is the ultimate blasphemy, a shameful desecration of the holy treasure of scripture. Every novel, every poem ever written, even the ones that masquerade as religious texts, are self-celebrating hymns in honor of mortal authors, boastful tokens of foolish pride that testify to nothing but a diabolical attempt at competing with the creative energy of the language of God.

And speaking of creative energy, he said, why are you writing in a foreign language? There was only one language in heaven—and it wasn’t English. But I don’t care. Go ahead, show the Lord what a vainglorious ingrate you are. God, you make me sick. You’re worse than the devil. Even Satan spoke Hebrew, even the demons had the decency to defy God in the language of Creation. But apparently, that’s not good enough for you.

He fell silent again. I used to visit him at the record store. Customers couldn’t tell he wasn’t talking. He would play records, nod in rhythm, ring people up, smile, hand them their bags and receipts, nod goodbye. It was all very natural. No talking. It wasn’t natural to talk. And if you must talk, if you must write, if you must use words, do it in secret, in a dark, deserted place, away from all the ostentatious hypocrites who flaunt their ability to produce a second-rate imitation of the Word, away from all those who look at language as if inspecting a molecule under a microscope. Analyzing the language of God, he said, is like dissecting human cadavers, like trying to come up with a mathematical formula for love, like going to psychotherapy to learn about your soul. You’re destroying the object under scrutiny, divesting it of its magic, losing something very precious in the process. Saying that language consists of substances, properties, and activities is like saying that life is just a string of chemical reactions, that the Bible is just a sequence of stories and laws, or that God is merely a pile of suppositions and speculations.

“I don’t think I agree,” I said. There was always this dilemma with my brother. Should I keep quiet? Should I try to refute his arguments? Would it be safer for me to refrain from offering an opinion of my own, or would he actually appreciate it if I talked back? I decided to talk back. “What you’re saying,” I said, “is that the divine factor in human language is too strong to allow any text, written or spoken, to be analyzed as a network of codependent and interrelated signs whose mechanical operation can be calculated and formulated.”

“That’s right.”

“Then take for example two candles,” I said.

“I don’t want to take two candles,” he said.

“Wait,” I said. “Hear me out.”

“I don’t want to hear you out. You’re wasting words.”

“Does the Bible say you can’t waste words?”

“Of course it does. Don’t heap up empty phrases like the gentiles do, for they think they’ll be heard because of their many words. Just listen. Don’t speak. God is talking to you. Pay attention, try to understand what is expected of you—and then do it.”

“That doesn’t make much sense,” I said. “You’re reducing scripture to the kind of relationship that exists between a master and his dog.”

“Actually,” my brother said, smiling, “that’s not a bad analogy. Except the master doesn’t give just orders. The master creates a new identity for those who heed his words. The master’s language gives the dog its name, its sense of purpose in the world, its place in the master-dog relationship. The only way you can interpret your life story is according to the words that come out of your master’s mouth.”

We were almost home. It was three in the morning. The scary thing about riding with my brother was that sometimes he would drive to some strange place without telling you where he was going. And if you asked, he wouldn’t answer. I didn’t ask. He drove past our house. It was raining. For some reason, maybe because we were talking about the Bible, I thought he was going to take me to see the dinosaur footprints. There was this place, just outside Jerusalem, where paleontologists had discovered what looked like the footprints of a dinosaur. For years it used to be a major local attraction, especially for school children on fieldtrips. But then there were rumors that the whole thing was fake, and the site was abandoned. They had built a little museum there, with a restaurant and a gift shop, but it was all gone.

We didn’t go to see the dinosaurs. My brother was just looking for a gas station where he could get a pack of cigarettes. He kept the motor running, leaving his door open. I stayed in the car. It was cold, but I thought he might get angry if I shut the door. I turned the radio on, but all the stations were playing sad Hebrew music. I turned it off.

When he got back in the car, he was smiling again. He lit a cigarette and looked at me. I looked back at him. He put his right arm on my left shoulder.

“So what were you saying about the candles?”

“Take two candles,” I said. “Put them on the table and light them up. If they don’t burn exactly the same—and they rarely do—you might be able to say that the so-called candle factor is too strong to allow physics and chemistry to be studied as scientific systems whose mechanical operation can be calculated and formulated. But as you know, there isn’t an ineffable candle factor. The candles burn differently either because of structural differences in the candles themselves or because of different external circumstances such as the temperature and air currents in the room.”

“So what are you trying to say? That language was manufactured in a wax factory?”

“All I’m trying to say is that once you divest the candle factor of its mystery, you can see it for what it is: a combination of ordinary, calculable features.”

“Ordinary features might be good for ordinary people. But the kingdom of God is not for ordinary people. The only way to enter the kingdom of God is to cut off your tongue and throw it away. And if your fingers insist on holding a pen, cut them off and throw them away. And if you think I’m crazy, I don’t care. If you think I’m sick, that’s fine. God is not with the healthy. God is always with the sick, the possessed, the depressed, the oppressed, the hungry, the thirsty, the deaf, the dumb. And forgive me for saying this, but if my eyes insisted on reading the nonsense you write, I wouldn’t hesitate to pluck them out and throw them away.”

When we got home, I asked him if he wanted some tea. He didn’t answer. He turned on the television, and I knew he would sit in front of it until the sun came up, then go to bed for an hour or two, then get up and go to work. I wanted to tell him how curious it was that the only time we ever had an interesting conversation was when he explained to me why he wouldn’t talk—but I didn’t. I knew he wouldn’t respond. Besides, I wasn’t sure it was such an interesting conversation.

Arts & Letters

Campus Box 89

Georgia College & State University

Milledgeville, GA 31061

(478) 445-1289

al@gcsu.edu

Arts & Letters accepts submissions from September 1 to March 1 (postmark deadlines). For complete information, see submission guidelines.