Free The Believers by Zoë Heller Page A

abstract executed in mustard yellow and gold--had the dowdy, third-rate quality of dentist art. Still, she enjoyed the odd mixture of formality and casualness with which the congregants conducted themselves--the way they kept breaking off from the headbanging fervor of their praying to wander about the sanctuary and chat. And there was something sweet, she thought, about the way they handled the Torah--undressing it and dandling it and parading it about as if it were an adored infant. The whole thing had a faintly preposterous, Masonic quality, but it was not, she conceded, without its anthropological charm.
    At the end of the Torah service, just as the scroll was being replaced in the ark, the congregation had begun to sing a slow, mournful prayer. Rosa, who rarely, if ever, responded to music without knowing and approving of what it was about , was surprised to find herself moved. Something in the prayer's austere melody was making the hairs on her arms stand up. A thought came to her, as clearly as if it had been spoken in her ear. You are connected to this. This song is your song . When next she glanced down at the siddur lying open in her hands, she was amazed to see the little ragged suns of her own teardrops turning the wafer-thin pages transparent.
    For days after this incident, Rosa tried to reassure herself that her response had been an insignificant somatic reflex. She had been tired. She had been feeling vulnerable. Music, together with certain sorts of majestic landscape, had a well-known tendency to induce such faux-sublime moments: artificial intimations of transcendent truths, grandiose hunches about the nature of the universe. It was all nonsense. Her tears had been no different from the ones people cried at sentimental television commercials. They represented nothing but a momentary and regrettable submission to kitsch.
    The next week, however, she found herself drawn back to the synagogue. She was only going, she told herself, in order to prove her previous response an aberration. But the second visit turned out to be no less bizarre and agitating than the first. Once again, she was filled with a mysterious, euphoric sense of belonging; once again, she was borne along on an irresistible current toward foolish weeping. The week after that, she attended two evening services in addition to the Sabbath service. Each time she entered the synagogue, she vowed to remain detached and rational. And each time, her composure was conquered by the same disembodied voice whispering gnomically in her ear. She was part of this. She had always been part of this.
    She approached her parents with the news of her inexplicable quasi-revelation, knowing full what their reaction was likely to be. Joel and Audrey had a keen contempt for all religions, but Judaism, being the only variety of theistic mumbo-jumbo in which they were themselves ancestrally implicated, had always inspired their most vehement scorn. They snarled at the sight of menorahs. They curled their lips at the mention of seder. They refused to attend any ceremony that took place in a synagogue. Even the bar mitzvahs of their friends' children--loosey-goosey reform affairs, at which nothing more solemnly religious occurred than the unveiling of the chocolate fountain at the after-party--were verboten. (Joel made it a point to send back all invitations to such events with the words THERE IS NO GOD scrawled rudely across their engraved lettering.) Still, it never occurred to Rosa not to tell her parents. She had no talent for subterfuge--especially the sort that offered to make her own life easier. As a general rule, the stronger the pragmatic arguments for discretion, the more keenly did she feel the moral obligation for full disclosure.
    Audrey's initial response had been one of derision. She sang snatches of "Hava Nagila" and asked Rosa if she intended to marry one of those smelly old men with the payess. It was Joel who was nakedly enraged. That Rosa had