What's going on, Jon?

Several years ago, a rather Buddhist supervisor of mine asked me, "What are you believing?" A momentous question, it stayed in a corner of my brain. The question re-emerged as I read There Is No Other, a stunning collection of short stories by Jonathan Papernick.

Initially, the first short story of the collection ("Skin for Skin") reads like a letter to the (now defunct) "Ask Beth" column in The Boston Globe. Girl arranges to be alone with boy, who, thereupon, wants to do more than make out. She does not want to do more than make out, but she does not want to be a "cocktease," either. What's a girl to do? Especially--and here ends any resemblance to "Ask Beth"--when the girl is Jewish and the boy is not. This matter of faith is neither light-weight nor easily surmounted. Although the boy quotes Friedrich "God is dead" Nietzsche, he lifts the crucifix "over his head with great difficulty, as if he were bearing the True Cross on his narrow shoulders...." (Papernick 10) Although the girl defines herself as "not Jewish" but rather "a secular humanist [who believes] in self-determination," she is nevertheless shocked to see the boy's uncircumcised penis against his thigh, "like the emergence of a sea monster from a bathtub." (11) Indeed, she is so shocked that she feels compelled--well, never mind the particulars--the point is, what she believes compels her toward what she ends up doing.

If the first story is like "Ask Beth" with a twist, then the second story ("There Is No Other") is like NCIS with a twist: the suicide bomber is a black Jewish 7th grader, Junius Barker, who promises not to blow up the classroom if someone can tell him why the Jews are the Chosen People. The "someone" who could tell him is the teacher, Aaron Needle, but the boy has decidedly turned on him--"And you, Needle, zip it." (24) Rising tension between Junius and Needle is dissolved in a prayer--

"You shall know today, and take to heart, that Adonai is the only God, in the heavens above and on earth below. There is no other." (27)

The word "other" is what resonates. The concept of "the other" meaning "the alien"--a concept crystallized by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex--is at the heart of this story. Despite the prayer uniting Junius and Needle, Junius feels very much like "the other," a feeling he pours forth in this rant:

"I want to know which half of me is chosen, the top half or the bottom, the inside or the outside, or the other way around? Why is it so hard to figure out? If God separated Jews from the other nations and gave them a different destiny, which half of me is chosen, which half of me bows down before the King of Kings, and which half can go fuck himself?" (29)

After throwing his arms around Junius in an embrace, which Junius resists, calling Needle a "homo" (yet another "other"), Needle whispers, "I believe in God. There is no other." (32) Needle's belief leads him--and Junius--to death, an ecstatic moment for Needle.

Another story in this collection ("The Miracle Birth") brought to mind a piece of Nurse Apple's Cookie Speech in the Stephen Sondheim musical Anyone Can Whistle--"My name is Apple, A-Double P-L-E, a fruit well mentioned in the Bible, that best seller of many miracles. I cite the Ten Commandments and the Burning Bush, to name only two." And I cite the Immaculate Conception (of Jesus), which is preceded, in the Old Testament, by the miraculous birth of Isaac to the exceedingly post-menopausal Sarah. Unquestionably, childless Shira Bavli in "The Miracle Birth" feels the weight of Biblical history: "Every time Shira came up to Jerusalem, she realized that [its] gravitational pull...was a hundred times that of the rest of the world, rendering even the simplest encounter as heavy as a stone cut from Solomon's Quarries." (50) Or, is Shira believing something about Jerusalem that endows it with this "gravitational pull"? In any case, Shira does give birth, at 40, to a girl, who, at 18, gives birth to a boy who, Vered believes, is the Messiah. Either of these births could be "The Miracle Birth" of the title, but, what I'm wondering is, does Vered really believe that her mother has "no faith that tomorrow can be better" (71), or is that just an angry retort in a mother-daughter spat of Biblical proportions?

In all these stories, belief in someone or something--could be "yer darling sweetheart baby" or "baseball for the Palestinians"--surely transforms the believer. All these stories repay a belief in the transformative power of stories.