Shalom Auslander (b. 1970) writes about the long shadow of a punitive God. He grew up in Monsey, New York, inside a strict Orthodox world that governed his food, his clothing, his calendar, and his sense of what waited for him if he failed. His books return to that world. They record what fear does to a child who believes an all-seeing authority counts his every sin and prepares a verdict.<\/p>\n
His literary lineage runs from Franz Kafka<\/a> (1883-1924) and Samuel Beckett<\/a> (1906-1989) to Philip Roth<\/a> (1933-2018) and Groucho Marx<\/a> (1890-1977). From the first two he takes dread and the sense of a sentence already entered. From the last two he takes timing and the refusal to let dread go unmocked. The result is a comic voice built on existential terror, where the joke and the wound arrive together.<\/p>\n Auslander was born into a home that placed him near the center of Modern Orthodox prestige. His maternal uncles were rabbis Norman Lamm<\/a> (1927-2020), president of Yeshiva University<\/a>, and Maurice Lamm<\/a> (1930-2016), rabbi of Beth Jacob<\/a>, a large synagogue in Los Angeles. In the memoir Foreskin’s Lament he renders Norman Lamm as a man of marble floors, a doorman, an elevator operator, a maid, a limousine and driver, and a habit of boasting about his visitors. The piano went unplayed. The art books went unread. The uncle announced that Herman Wouk<\/a> (1915-2019) had come by the day before. The young Auslander watched the display and learned what religious eminence could look like up close.<\/p>\n Inside the home itself, the picture darkened. He describes a father whose rage frightened him when the wine ran out and frightened him more when it did not. He describes a mother whose own fears thickened the atmosphere. Over all of it stood the God he was taught to expect: watchful, easily offended, quick to punish a boy for mixing meat and cheese. In his telling, the father and the God blur into a single figure. Both keep accounts. Both wait.<\/p>\n He began his schooling at the Yeshiva of Spring Valley in Monsey and hated it. A boy named Avrumi Mendlowitz pinned him to the ground and squeezed his testicles, once after a low test score that Auslander had tried to console him over. In fifth grade he moved to a Modern Orthodox school, where the presence of girls registered as a revelation. He went on to the Marsha Stern Talmudical Academy<\/a> in Manhattan. The countervailing education came from outside the classroom. In the woods behind his home he found a cache of pornographic magazines, studied them with the attention he had been trained to give Torah, then burned them, then found more. He found his father’s magazines and his mother’s vibrators and burned those too. The pattern held: appetite, secrecy, shame, destruction, return.<\/p>\n As a teenager he rebelled through petty crime, drugs, and truancy while reading widely and slipping into museums and secular culture. He enrolled at Queens College<\/a> and left within weeks. He chose writing over the academy and over the world he came from. He has kept no friends from his Orthodox childhood.<\/p>\n His apprenticeship ran through magazines and radio. He published essays and short fiction in Esquire<\/a>, The New Yorker<\/a>, The New York Times Magazine<\/a>, and Tablet<\/a>, and he became a regular contributor to This American Life<\/a>, where his confessional storytelling found a national audience. A New Yorker piece about youth hockey drew angry letters. Months later the magazine ran a chapter about his father trying to build an ark, with the abuse in plain view, and the letters stopped. Auslander took the silence as proof that readers will tolerate cruelty inside a family while bristling at irreverence toward a game.<\/p>\n His first book, Beware of God (2005), collected interconnected stories of characters caught between religious obligation and modern life. The God of these stories is vindictive, petty, and bureaucratic. A.M. Homes<\/a> (b. 1961) called him the freshest voice in Jewish writing since Roth. Christopher Hitchens<\/a> (1949-2011) praised the irreverence. The book set the terms of everything that followed: blasphemy and sacrilege turned toward emotional injury rather than mere provocation.<\/p>\n The breakthrough came with Foreskin’s Lament (2007). The title turns on his anxiety over whether to circumcise his unborn son, one more ritual stirring fear. The memoir traces how a man arrives at 34 believing what he believes and fearing what he fears. He insists the family history carries as much weight as the religious history, and he laughs at the reactionary readers who think they have caught him out by noticing that he hates his father as much as his God, as though he had left those stories in by accident. The book entered the New York Times list of the year’s best, and reviewers reached for David Sedaris<\/a> (b. 1956) as a comparison, though Auslander runs darker and more metaphysical. The Jewish press mostly praised him. The Jewish Press<\/a>, edited by Jason Maoz, called him a creepy sociopath and a self-hating Jew and judged that he could not tie Roth’s shoelaces.<\/p>\n His first novel, Hope: A Tragedy (2012), moved the comic vision into invention. An elderly, foul-mouthed Anne Frank<\/a> (1929-1945) lives in the attic of an American family’s house decades after the war, and the premise opens onto inherited trauma and the impossibility of leaving history behind. The novel won the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize<\/a> and reached the Thurber Prize<\/a> shortlist. A following gathered for it over the years.<\/p>\n Mother for Dinner (2020) carried the method further. A family of assimilated American cannibals preserves its identity by eating its dead. By swapping Jewishness for cannibalism, Auslander turns his attention to tribal loyalty, assimilation, and the arbitrary ground of group belonging. Reviewers found a serious argument under the grotesque comedy: communities survive by the stories and rituals they enforce. The Sunday Times<\/a> and The Economist<\/a> named it among the year’s best.<\/p>\n FEH (2024) returns to the territory of the first memoir and shifts the weight from religion to shame. The Yiddish word for disgust organizes a life spent believing oneself defective. Auslander argues that inherited stories of inadequacy keep shaping an adult until he rewrites them on purpose. The book reached the National Jewish Book Awards<\/a> shortlist and won the 2026 James Thurber Prize for American Humor.<\/p>\n Outside publishing he created the Showtime<\/a> series Happyish<\/a>, developed for Philip Seymour Hoffman<\/a> (1967-2014). Hoffman’s death halted production, and Steve Coogan<\/a> (b. 1965) took the role when the show resumed. It ran one season on disappointment, ambition, commerce, and death, and critics admired its refusal of sitcom comfort. In recent years Auslander has produced the YouTube series UNGODLY: Good Lessons from a Bad God, rereading the Hebrew Bible with God as the antagonist and asking viewers to separate ethics from obedience. The series extends the quarrel that runs through all his work, a quarrel with conceptions of power that breed fear instead of moral adulthood.<\/p>\n Across the books one question recurs for readers and reviewers: how much of the rage is felt and how much is craft. Auslander answers that he writes because not writing leaves him wanting to die, and because writing makes him a better husband and a kinder father. He describes his stance toward God as terror rather than belief. He fears that the God of his childhood might exist, and he casts the relationship in the grammar of abuse: the beatings, then the apology and the lovely dinner, then the certainty that tomorrow brings more of the same. He rejects the memoir label and the charge that he attacks Judaism. The book, he says, is the story of one man raised under a violent God and looking for peace. He offers a parable for it. He pulled alongside a car, told the driver about a flat tire, and got accused of hating cars. Yell at the teacher, he says, not at what was taught.<\/p>\n He guards himself against his readers in literal terms. He once feared that someone might come to his house and throw a brick. He answered that he keeps big dogs and big guns. He stopped reading reviews and stopped searching his own name, calling the pre-publication critics the lunatics and the Amazon<\/a> reviewers bottom-feeders who cannot manage even to blog. He treats The New York Times<\/a> as the arbiter that will tell him whether the work is good. Asked which award means the most, he said he had won none.<\/p>\n The firsthand record from 2006 and 2007 sharpens the portrait. He answered interview questions only by email, calling that the least bad form of the trade, and let two months pass before replying the first time. His answers swing between deflection and confession. Asked what he wanted to be as a child, he said somewhere else. Asked about his soul, he said, my what. Asked how he tells right from wrong, he described consulting a badly written book compiled by terrified ancient nomads, then turned the joke on the believer who claims the commandments are all that keep him from raping and killing. He invited William Faulkner<\/a> (1897-1962) as his one permitted ancestor, citing the line that a poem outweighs any number of old ladies, since the work of art exists to reveal and to be honest. He said he did not want to hurt anyone, and noted that no one in the book takes a worse beating than he does.<\/p>\n At a reading in Pasadena in November 2007<\/a>, about forty people came, and the writer in the audience wearing a yarmulke counted himself the only one. Auslander read for fifteen minutes, looked up once, took friendly questions, and sold around fifty books. He was compact and tightly wound. He talked afterward about the trick God had played on him: thirty years spent escaping the world of his childhood, a book written to be free of it, and now a touring schedule that carried him from one Jewish community center to the next. He said the angriest response to his work comes not from the Orthodox, many of whom show up to his readings and laugh, but from Reform rabbis who believe their movement already answered the problem and who want him to come to temple. He said he is not in the market.<\/p>\n Auslander is married to the artist and writer Orli Auslander. They have two children and live in Los Angeles. He has taught in the MFA program run jointly by the Jewish Theological Seminary<\/a> and Columbia University. The man who fled the rabbinic world of his uncles now lectures a few miles, in spirit, from where it raised him, still writing about the God he cannot prove and cannot leave.<\/p>\n ‘A Big Misunderstanding’<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n While mainstream social scientists and polite commentators treat human strife as a series of grand misunderstandings to be cured by education or positive thinking, Auslander built his reputation by systematically exposing those assumptions as fraudulent comfort. The Great Delusion<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Mainstream literary critique reads Auslander through the lens of radical psychological trauma and dark, existential satire. He is celebrated as the ultimate ex-Orthodox iconoclast, a man who fled the crushing theological confinement of Monsey, New York, to wage a furious, lifelong war against a tyrannical God and the collective guilt of his upbringing. His writing treats this escape as a sovereign individual necessity, a struggle to achieve psychological autonomy through brutal, comedic text. The Tacit<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Stephen Turner (b. 1951) spent a career arguing that the social sciences misuse the idea of tacit knowledge<\/a>. The standard account treats a practice as a shared thing. A community holds it, hands it to the young, and the young internalize it, after which they carry a common substrate that explains why they act alike. Turner denies the shared thing. Nothing passes from one mind to another in the way the transmission story needs. What a child acquires is his own habit, built from his own history of exposure and correction. The likeness among members is functional. Each trains up a disposition close enough to the others to allow coordination, but no single object sits behind the family resemblance, and no warehouse issues the practice. Habit is causal. It runs below articulation. It answers to the history that built it, not to the opinions a man later comes to hold. The Other Set of Books<\/strong><\/p>\n On the second day of Rosh Hashanah, Shalom Auslander rents a sport utility vehicle and drives down the Thruway toward Monsey. He rents it so the family will not catch him in the family car on a day no observant Jew would drive. He worries the length of the trip that God might use the occasion to kill him in a wreck. Dying in Monsey as the book comes out, he says, would make a great punch line, since there is no sicker comic than God. He does not believe a word of the system that built this fear. He has said so in print, at length, for money. He believes none of it and he braces for the verdict anyway. The Set<\/strong><\/p>\n Shalom Auslander writes from inside a world, and that world has a center of gravity. Call it literary New York and its satellites, the magazine and radio and publishing circuit that runs from the New Yorker offices through the better Brooklyn dinner tables out to Woodstock and the second homes upstate, with a Los Angeles annex for the ones who take television money. Auslander has lived the full arc of it. He published essays and fiction in Esquire<\/a>, the New Yorker<\/a>, the New York Times Magazine<\/a>, and Tablet<\/a>. He became a regular on This American Life<\/a>, the radio program that did more than any other to set the tone of the set, the confessional voice, the rueful self-implication, the small domestic shame opened up for a national audience. He created a Showtime<\/a> series. He has taught in the MFA program the Jewish Theological Seminary<\/a> runs with Columbia<\/a>. He knows the world from the inside, and his books quarrel with it as much as they quarrel with Monsey.<\/p>\n What the set values, first, is the sentence. Prose is the coin. A man earns standing by the line he can write, and the highest praise routes through lineage. A.M. Homes<\/a> (b. 1961) called Auslander the freshest voice in Jewish writing since Philip Roth<\/a> (1933-2018), and the compliment lands because Roth is the saint of this calendar, the proof that a man can turn the embarrassing material of his own family and his own people into permanent literature. Christopher Hitchens<\/a> (1949-2011) praised the irreverence, and Hitchens carried his own kind of capital here, the writer as fearless sayer of the unsayable. The names a writer gets compared to are the names that rank the room. Saul Bellow<\/a>, Bernard Malamud<\/a>, Roth above all. To be measured against them is to be admitted. Jason Maoz of the Jewish Press<\/a> tried to expel Auslander from the company by the same logic, writing that he could not tie Roth’s shoelaces. The insult and the praise use the same yardstick.<\/p>\n The set values candor, the willingness to expose the self, and it has a preferred grammar for doing so. This is the David Sedaris<\/a> (b. 1956) register, the public radio confession, the writer as the biggest fool in his own story, rueful and warm, the shame defanged by charm. Auslander has the candor and refuses the warmth. He told an interviewer there is the NPR way, where you make fun of yourself and you are the biggest fool in the room, and then there is letting it be angry, and he chooses anger. This matters for his place in the set. He meets its central demand, total exposure, and violates its tonal etiquette, which asks that exposure be softened into likability. He gives the wound without the reassurance that he is, underneath, a nice man you would want at your dinner.<\/p>\n The set values irreverence toward religion, and here Auslander sits in a precise spot the set finds harder to hold than it admits. The respectable position runs along an axis. At one end, the believers. At the far end, Hitchens and Dawkins, religion as the root of human evil. The set’s comfort lies near the Hitchens end, where faith is a thing intelligent people have grown out of and may now mock from a safe distance. Auslander does not sit there. He reports from the middle, the man who cannot believe and cannot stop fearing, who calls God insane and rents the SUV anyway. Mark Sarvas caught this in his review, that Auslander writes as one who can neither deny religion’s lunacies nor do away with its hold, and that this makes him more representative than either extreme. The set prefers the clean atheism. Auslander hands it something messier, a man still inside the thing he is attacking, and the discomfort is real.<\/p>\n Now the status games, which run on a few clear currencies.<\/p>\n The first is placement. Where you publish ranks you, and the hierarchy is known to everyone in it. The New Yorker tops it. Auslander treats the New York Times<\/a> as the body that confers worth. Asked how he knows when he has done good work, he says he imagines the New York Times will tell him so. Asked which of his awards means the most, he says he has won none, which is itself a move, the writer too serious for prizes, ranking himself by refusing the lower currency. The set plays this game constantly and pretends not to.<\/p>\n The second currency is proximity to fame, and Auslander learned it young, watching his uncle Norman Lamm<\/a> (1927-2020) play the rabbinic version. The uncle kept marble floors and a doorman and an elevator man and announced his visitors at the door. Herman Wouk<\/a> (1915-2019) was here yesterday. Alan Alda goes to my synagogue, big donor. The boy watched a man measure his standing in celebrity names, and the literary set runs the same game in its own coin, the famous friend, the blurb from the bigger writer, the table at the right dinner. Sarvas talks to Auslander for twenty minutes at the Pasadena reading and Auslander hovers, then later tells Sarvas he reads the blog because it makes him laugh. The small jockeying for who recognizes whom, who knows the name and who does not, runs all through the scene. Auslander introduces himself and Sarvas’s friend shows no light of recognition, and the absence registers, because in this world recognition is the currency and its absence is a small wound.<\/p>\n The third currency is the angry letter, the controversy that proves you struck a nerve. Auslander has a sharp read on this. When the New Yorker ran his hockey piece, people wrote furious letters. Months later it ran a chapter about his father trying to build an ark, abuse in plain view, and nobody wrote. He concluded that readers will forgive cruelty inside a family and bristle at irreverence toward a game. The set treats the angry letter as a trophy, evidence of relevance, and Auslander both collects the trophy and analyzes the collecting.<\/p>\n The set holds a set of normative claims, the shoulds it enforces without quite stating them. A writer should tell the truth about himself, especially the shameful truth. George Orwell<\/a>‘s rule, which Auslander cites approvingly, that the only believable parts of an autobiography are the shameful parts, is close to scripture here. A writer should not flatter his subjects, including himself. Faulkner<\/a>‘s line, Auslander’s chosen ancestor on this point, that the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies, that art exists to reveal and to be honest whatever it costs the people in it. A writer should not write to please a movement or join a cause, and should hold the consoling answer in suspicion. When the Reform rabbis come to make him their poster child, he tells them he is not in the market, and the set respects this, the refusal of the easy affiliation, even as the set has its own affiliations it does not name.<\/p>\n Underneath the normative claims sit the essentialist ones, the beliefs about what people simply are. The set tends to hold that the examined life is higher than the unexamined one, that the writer who confronts his terror is more fully a person than the believer who is spared it by faith. Auslander shares this and complicates it. He says he is inspired by those who see themselves as more than just Jews and depressed by those who think being Jewish is all that matters. That is an essentialist claim with a hierarchy inside it, the cosmopolitan self ranked above the tribal self, the man who contains multitudes above the man content with one identity. The set holds this nearly universally and rarely says it aloud, because saying it aloud sounds like contempt for ordinary people, which it partly is.<\/p>\n The set carries one more essentialist belief, about itself, that it is the place where honesty lives, where the comforting lies of religion and family and nation get examined and named. The moral grammar follows from it. Good is exposure, complexity, the refusal of consolation, the well-made sentence that tells a hard truth. Bad is sentimentality, propaganda, the flattering lie, the easy uplift, writing that serves a tribe instead of the truth. Auslander speaks this grammar fluently. His whole quarrel with Monsey is conducted in it, the charge that the old world traded honesty for comfort and fear for thought.<\/p>\n And here the portrait turns, because Auslander aims the grammar at his own set too, though more quietly. He distrusts the dead-writer worship, telling an interviewer that coming from a world that fetishizes the dead, he has trouble looking to past writers for advice, which is a swipe at the lineage game the set plays with Roth and Bellow. He distrusts the public radio softness, choosing anger over the likable self-mockery the set rewards. He distrusts the clean atheism the set finds comfortable, planting himself in the middle where the fear still lives. He came from one total moral world, the Orthodoxy of Monsey, with its all-seeing keeper and its ledger of sins, and he landed in another moral world, literary New York, with its own saints and its own sins and its own promise of significance through the well-made confession. He serves the second world’s god, the truth told on the page, and he keeps enough distance to see that it is a world too, with its own consoling lies about how free of consoling lies it is.<\/p>\n That distance is his position. Inside the set, fluent in its values, ranked high in its currencies, and never quite a believer in it either, the same way he is never quite a believer in the God he fled and never quite free of Him. He is the man in both rooms who cannot fully sit down in either.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Shalom Auslander (b. 1970) writes about the long shadow of a punitive God. He grew up in Monsey, New York, inside a strict Orthodox world that governed his food, his clothing, his calendar, and his sense of what waited for … Continue reading
\nPinsof argues that intellectuals desperately want to believe everything wrong with the world is a mistake, because that makes the people who correct mistakes the most important people alive. In his memoir Feh (2024), Auslander tackles this dynamic directly through the lens of deep-seated trauma and religious guilt. The Yiddish word “feh” represents the ambient, inescapable message he received from his ultra-Orthodox upbringing in Monsey, New York: the foundational story that humans are inherently wretched, broken, and unlovable. Where modern psychology or progressive interventions attempt to reframe such misery as a cognitive glitch that can be solved with gratitude journaling or mindfulness, Auslander rejects the intervention model. He treats human self-loathing not as an accidental brain-fart, but as a robust and deeply accurate adaptation to a hostile environment. The psychological pain is not an error in translation; it is the raw reality of survival in a world governed by manipulative forces.
\nA central theme of Pinsof’s essay is the gap between our high-minded mission statements and our actual goals, which revolve around dominating rivals under moralistic pretexts and seizing control of coercive mechanisms. Auslander’s breakthrough memoir, Foreskin’s Lament (2007), tracks this logic across the strict theological structures of his youth. Religious communities often present their rituals and laws as an pursuit of universal love, holiness, and spiritual purity. Auslander’s satire strips away this posture to reveal the underlying operation: religion functions as a high-stakes, zero-sum competition over intergroup status, social conformity, and tribal leverage. The strict strictures are not misunderstandings of God’s grace; they are savvy tools used by elites to police behavior, punish non-conformists, and secure status within the hierarchy. His ongoing YouTube project, UNGODLY: Good Lessons from a Bad God, reinforces this frame by portraying the biblical deity not as a misunderstood force of ultimate love, but as a cruel, short-tempered, and vindictive antagonist operating on pure power dynamics.
\nIn his fiction, such as Hope: A Tragedy (2012) and Mother for Dinner (2020), Auslander routinely satirizes tribal identity and identity politics. Pinsof notes that partisan hatred and identity-based friction are not primitive whoopsies; they are rational strategies deployed to fight dirty in high-stakes competitions over resources and cultural dominance.
\nIn Mother for Dinner, Auslander takes this to a grotesque literal extreme by examining identity and heritage through the lens of cannibalism. He demonstrates that cultural formation and the stated “hunger for meaning” are frequently masks for base-level consumption, exclusion, and social dominance.
\nAuslander’s characters do not suffer because they lack information or need their consciousness raised. They suffer because they are locked in evolutionary traps where self-interest, family alliances, and defensive behavior are paramount. By using pitch-black humor, Auslander implicitly sides with Pinsof’s bracing conclusion: humanity has no deep desire to fix its broken nature, and our grandest intellectual explanations are merely the study of the hole we are stuck in. <\/p>\n
\nMearsheimer\u2019s realism<\/a> slices through this therapeutic framing, showing that Auslander\u2019s lifelong panic is not a unique theological crisis, but the predictable behavior of a social animal who cannot escape the structural programming of his childhood tribe.
\nIn Foreskin’s Lament, Auslander chronicles a childhood dominated by a strict, punitive religious framework designed to police every thought, action, and bite of food. He frames this as a form of institutionalized abuse, an irrational system of theological terror that weaponizes the divine to crush individual freedom.
\nIf Mearsheimer is right, the ultra-Orthodox community Auslander fled is not an irrational anomaly. It is an optimized, high-cohesion survival vehicle designed to withstand centuries of structural scarcity, hostility, and international anarchy. To protect its perimeter without a sovereign state vehicle of its own, the sub-tribe must enforce absolute internal conformity and strict boundary maintenance.The intense value infusion Auslander received as a boy\u2014the hardwiring of existential stakes into daily routines\u2014is the classic mechanism a group uses to ensure collective loyalty. Auslander treats the terror as a religious pathology; realism shows it is the psychological armor a vulnerable group requires to maximize its relative power and prevent its dissolution.
\nAuslander\u2019s entire creative identity is built on his defection. He writes extensively about breaking dietary laws, mocking rituals, and raising his children completely outside the faith, positioning the individual as a rational actor who can use independent critique to detach himself from the group matrix.
\nMearsheimer\u2019s hierarchy of human preferences places independent reason and self-chosen identity last among human motivations, far behind the unreflective survival instincts of the group. Auslander\u2019s books prove that defection is a structural illusion. Even as a secular, prosperous writer living in the American empire, his mind remains entirely captive to the original value infusion.
\nHe cannot write a page without obsessing over the God he claims to reject, demonstrating that the brain programming of early socialization is permanent. He did not escape tribal logic; he merely moved to a different elite domestic sub-tribe\u2014the secular, literary intelligentsia\u2014where he uses his raw, blasphemous text to manage his new reputation, signal alignment to his peers, and secure a place on their status map.
\nIn his novel Hope: A Tragedy, Auslander delivers a dark parable about a man who moves to the countryside to escape history, only to find an old, cynical Anne Frank hiding in his attic, typing out her own bitter memoirs. The book is a fierce attack on optimism, arguing that human obsession with past trauma and historical injury poisons the present and makes real hope an impossibility.
\nMearsheimer\u2019s anthropology reveals that Auslander\u2019s satire is actually a description of structural reality. History cannot be outgrown or escaped because the anarchic structure of the world ensures that group competition is permanent.
\nA tribe does not preserve and narrate historical trauma because it lacks psychological insight or narrative resilience; it institutionalizes trauma as defensive armor. The memory of the catastrophe is the tool used to guarantee internal solidarity and justify the group’s defensive posture against potential predators. By mocking the persistence of historical memory, Auslander mistakes a vital mechanism of group survival for a simple cognitive error, while his own text proves that when the perimeter of absolute security contracts, the past always reclaims the individual.<\/p>\n
\nShalom Auslander renounced the doctrine in full and kept the dread entire, and he narrates the split himself across five books.
\nHe calls the God of his childhood insane and abusive. He describes the way he tells right from wrong: he consults a poorly written book compiled by terrified ancient nomads and checks what their violent and vengeful God said he should and should not do. He turns the joke on the believer who claims the commandments are all that keep him from raping and killing, and suggests the man turn himself in to the authorities. He treats the source text as a relic. Asked whether he believes in God, he answers that believe is too lofty a word. On the level of stated proposition, the case is closed. He holds none of it.
\nAuslander rents a sport utility vehicle to drive to Monsey on the second day of Rosh Hashanah, because being caught in the family car on a day no observant Jew would drive sits in the back of his mind the whole time. He worries on the Thruway that God might take the occasion to kill him in a wreck, and jokes that dying in Monsey as the book comes out would make a great punch line, since there is no sicker comic than God. He deleted the manuscript several times while writing it, afraid God would strike down his family. The line that holds the whole split is his own: he is terrified that the God he was raised with might actually exist. Terror without belief. The body keeps the calendar after the man has thrown the calendar out.
\nThe dread was never a proposition Auslander held and could therefore drop. It was a trained response, laid down across a childhood of feedback and correction, and a trained response does not lift when a belief lifts, because the two run on separate causal tracks. He installed the unbelief himself, late, by reading and reasoning. The fear got installed early, by a father whose rage frightened him drunk or sober, by teachers who told a small child that a violent power in the sky would punish him for mixing meat and cheese, by years of waiting for the verdict. Argument can reach what argument built. It cannot reach what habit built, because it was never speaking that language.
\nThis is why the books exist and why they fail to do the one thing that might end them. Auslander can articulate the dread without limit. He can name its source, trace its history, mock it, set it in the grammar of an abusive marriage where the beatings give way to an apology and a lovely dinner and then the certainty that tomorrow brings more of the same. Each book is a fresh act of articulation. None of it touches the disposition, because articulation is a belief-track operation and the fear lives on the habit track. He can say the fear in a hundred ways and the saying changes nothing, since only retraining would change it, and no retraining is on offer. The original training ran for two decades through a child’s nervous system. Nothing in adult life supplies a counterforce of that length or that depth.
\nAuslander left the community. He keeps no friends from his Orthodox childhood. He dropped the observance, the doctrine, the calendar as obligation. By the transmission story, exit should return the thing he was holding in trust, the way a man hands back a borrowed tool. It returns nothing. He carries the whole apparatus of fear into a house near Woodstock and then to Los Angeles, intact. Turner accounts for this where the standard story cannot. There was never a community possession to give back. What Auslander holds is his own residue, built in his own history, his alone. The fear did not live in Monsey. It lived in him. Leaving the place that trained the habit does as much for the habit as moving house does for a limp.
\nHis own explanation runs half right by Turner’s measure and half wrong. He tells the angry reader to yell at the teacher, not at what was taught. He pulled up next to a car, he says, told the driver about a flat tire, and got accused of hating cars. He laughs at the reactionary who thinks he has caught him out by noticing he hates his father as much as his God, as though the family stories landed in the book by mistake. The location is correct. He puts the cause in the teaching and the teacher and the household, in the training rather than in Judaism as a set of claims, and Turner would endorse the move, because the training is where habit comes from. He overstates the distance. The teaching did not deposit a doctrine he could now disown from a safe remove. It built a disposition that is now him, not a position he occupies. He talks as though he stands outside the car pointing at the flat. He is the car.
\nReaders and reviewers ask whether the rage is felt or a device, whether a man this funny about his terror can be in any real distress. Turner answers it. If the dread were belief, the rage would be a pose, because a man can stop believing and stop being angry at what he no longer credits. The rage holds because the dread is habit, and habit persists against the will, and a man stays angry at what he cannot will away. The anger is the friction between a belief track that has moved on and a habit track that refuses to follow. He is not performing fear of a God he finds absurd. He finds the God absurd and fears Him anyway, and the gap between those two facts is the engine of every book.
\nHe writes, he says, because not writing leaves him wanting to die, and because writing makes him a better husband and a kinder father. Read through Turner, the compulsion is the same kind of thing as the dread. Not a vocation he chose but a disposition that chose for him, a trained response he can describe and cannot switch off. The man who left can narrate the leaving for the rest of his life and never finish it, because the part of him that stayed was never the part that holds opinions.<\/p>\n
\nThat is the man. To read him through Ernest Becker (1924-1974) is to ask what immortality vehicle a man builds after he has smashed the one he was handed, and what he does when the smashing leaves the fear in place.
\nBecker’s argument starts from a creature who knows he will die and cannot live inside that knowledge. So the culture hands him a hero system, a scheme that lets his life count beyond his body, that promises significance against the rot. Every society runs one. The terms vary. The function holds. A man earns his place in the scheme and earns, with it, the sense that he will not be erased.
\nMonsey ran the most complete hero system a child could be given. Nothing fell outside the ledger. Food counted. Clothing counted. The hat, the sidelocks, the direction a boy faced when he prayed. An all-seeing keeper recorded each act and prepared a judgment. Becker would note the cost buried in the gift. A scheme that makes every act cosmically weighty makes every act cosmically dangerous. The boy who matters infinitely can fail infinitely. Auslander got the significance and the terror in one package, because they are the same package. He was trained for maximal weight, and a man trained for maximal weight cannot later tolerate weightlessness. This is why he cannot simply walk into unbelief and rest there. The training took.
\nHe saw, up close, that the scheme came in more than one currency. His uncle Norman Lamm kept a three-story apartment with marble floors, a doorman, an elevator man, a maid, a driver. A grand piano nobody played. Art books nobody read. The uncle announced his visitors. You know who was here yesterday. Herman Wouk. You know who goes to my synagogue. Alan Alda. Big donor. Here the immortality currency runs on worldly eminence, on the famous name dropped at the door, on proximity to men the wider world already counts. The boy watched one hero system, the punitive God of the ledger, share a bloodline with another, the rabbi who measures his standing in celebrities. Both promise that you will be more than a creature who dies. They disagree on the coin.
\nThen the subtraction. Auslander throws out the doctrine. He calls the God of his childhood insane and abusive. He describes consulting a poorly written book compiled by terrified ancient nomads to learn right from wrong, and he turns the joke on the believer who claims the commandments are all that hold him back from raping and killing. He keeps no friends from the old world. He drops the observance, the calendar, the obligation. By any clean account he should now be free, and free men do not rent SUVs to hide from a God they have called a fiction.
\nBecker explains the residue. You cannot subtract a hero system and leave nothing in the hole. The creature still faces what the system was built to cover, and now he faces it without cover. Auslander faces it twice. Here are his two terrors, and they sit at opposite poles. The first is that the God of his childhood might actually exist, watchful, abusive, keeping the books, readying the wreck on the Thruway. He says he is terrified of exactly this. The second runs the other way. What if the big joke is that God has nothing to do with any of this and does not care about it at all. That is the terror of the void, the Becker terror in its raw form, the suspicion that the ledger was always blank and the suffering bought nothing. Most men fear one annihilation. Auslander is pinned between two. Punishment on one side, pointlessness on the other, and no third place to stand.
\nSo he builds a new vehicle out of the wreckage of the old. He writes the book. And the book is not a confession and not a sermon. It is the other set of books. God keeps the record of his sins. Auslander keeps the counter-record, in print, where it can be read. Listen to what he says about publishing. When he wrote it for himself, anything could happen and no one would know. Now it is out there, so if He tries any shit, people are going to know. They will say, he is right, that Guy is a dick. The reader is the jury. The New York Times is the bench that will tell him whether the work is good and, with it, whether he gets to be more than a creature who dies in Monsey. He has named his consecrating authority and built his immortality bid as a case filed against the defendant, who may or may not exist, before the only court left to a man who threw out the original one.
\nThis makes candor the sacred value of his system, and it makes the joke the sacred form. He invites William Faulkner (1897-1962) as his single permitted ancestor, citing the line that the work of art exists to reveal and to be honest, that an ode outweighs any number of old ladies. He praises George Orwell’s rule that only the shameful parts of an autobiography ring true. He says he bleeds on the page. The honesty is the point because the case requires evidence, and the evidence must be the shameful thing, the burned magazines, the father’s rage when the wine ran out and worse when it did not, the boy pinned to the ground and squeezed. And the joke carries it, because the joke is the one vessel that holds the terror without killing the man who carries it. In his system comedy is sacramental. It is the form candor takes when straight speech would burn the speaker down.
\nNow the word itself. Honesty looks like a single sacred value and turns out to mean something different inside every system that prizes it.
\nThe Jesuit in the box treats truth as confession. He speaks the shameful thing in secret, to one ear, to be absolved and then erased, the soul washed and returned to grace. The dissident under a regime of lies treats truth as the forbidden fact spoken against the state, copied at night, passed hand to hand, an act that might cost him everything and means nothing if no cause receives it. The Method actor on the stage treats truth as emotion summoned on cue, behavior made truthful under invented circumstances, manufactured and real at once. The war correspondent treats truth as the verified dispatch, the body counted, the atrocity logged so the world cannot say it did not know. The analysand on the couch treats truth as free association, the unspeakable thing said aloud to drain its charge, honesty as cure. The Reform rabbi treats truth as the tradition read fresh for the present hour, candor about what the old words can mean now.
\nAuslander’s honesty is none of these. He wants no absolution, so it is not the Jesuit’s. He serves no cause, so it is not the dissident’s. He summons nothing on cue, so it is not the actor’s. He seeks no cure and says so, telling the man who asks after his soul, my what. He offers the Reform rabbi the answer he gives all of them, that he is not in the market. His honesty is testimony for the counter-record, the shameful thing said in public so the cosmos stands accused before a reader who will outlive the trial. The same five letters. Six men. Six terrors held at bay by six different uses of one word.
\nThe rival systems crowd around him and he refuses each on its own terms. The Orthodox of Monsey want him back inside the ledger. Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) and Richard Dawkins (b. 1941) offer a clean hero system of reason against superstition, and Auslander declines it, since reason cannot reach a fear that reason did not install, and a man who is afraid of a God he calls absurd is not a New Atheist. The Reform rabbis, the angriest of his readers, believe their movement already solved his problem and want him at temple, and he tells them he is not buying. Each system asks him to trade his counter-record for membership. He keeps the record.
\nThree coordinates locate him. He stands between two terrors rather than behind one, which is why he can neither return to the God who would punish him nor relax into the void that would release him, and why the books keep coming, each a fresh entry in a case that cannot close while both terrors hold. He has made candor sacred and the joke its only safe container, so that the comedy critics take for a device is the load-bearing wall, the form without which the terror would take the man down with it. And he has named the New York Times where Monsey named God, which tells you the function survived the content, that he left the scheme and kept the shape of it, a man still earning a verdict from a higher authority, still keeping the books against the day he is called to account, no longer sure anyone is reading them and unable to stop writing them down.<\/p>\n