Free God's Grace by Bernard Malamud Page B

them both going up the mountain to participate in the ceremony God had ordained, but only Abraham came down. So where was Isaac?”
    Buz, clearly in suspense, said he had no idea.
    Cohn said some Talmudic sages had interpreted it that Isaac had been carried off by the Angel to the Garden of Eden, and that he had rested there, convalescing from the bloody wound his father had inflicted on him.
    “Thot’s whot I said, but you got mod ot me.”
    Cohn replied the true reading obviously was that Abraham had not cut his son’s throat—God wouldn’t allow it—no matter what Abraham’s intention, conscious or otherwise, may have been.
    “A certain philosopher—somebody called Kierkegaard, whom I haven’t told you about, though he’s on my list to bring up—he felt that Abraham really wanted to murder Isaac. Freud might have agreed—I’ll be filling you in on him in the very near future.”
    “Do I hov to know everything?” Buz complained. He hopped off Cohn’s lap, circled the cave, then climbed back on him.
    Cohn loved explication—had once considered becoming a teacher. “Everything that counts,” he replied. “Which leads to why the interpretation of Abraham as his son’s cutthroat persists through the centuries. That says something about the
nature of man—his fantasies of death that get enacted into the slaughter of man by man—kinfolk or strangers in droves —on every possible mindless occasion. But let’s not go into that now, except to point out that man paid for who he was —maybe—to my mind—er—somewhat unjustly.”
    He glanced uneasily at the split up in the ceiling, yet still ran on. “When you bring it all back to basics,” he whispered, “it means that God made man seriously imperfect. Maybe what was on His mind was that if He made man whole, pacific, good, he would feel no need to become better, and if he didn’t, he would never truly be a man. He also planned it that man had to contend with evil, or it was no go. But the awful thing was that the evil was much a bigger bag of snakes than man could handle. We behaved toward each other like animals, and therefore the Second Flood followed hard on the Day of Devastation.”
    Buz hooted, “I’m on onimol and hov always been a vege-torion.”
    Cohn complimented him and hastily returned to Isaac lost on the mountain. “How do you think he got down?”
    Buz suggested that maybe a kidnapper had kidnapped him.
    Cohn said that might have happened. “But murdered, kidnapped, or whatever, he got to Paradise—some commentators said. There he was resurrected, they say. That’s a twist in the story that shows the human passion to bring the dead back to life. Given the nature of death—how long it lasts once it sets in—who can blame us for inventing resurrection?”

    Cohn said his personal opinion was that man’s will to hang on to life was a worthy reason why God should have preserved humanity. “Call it upholding the value of His original investment.”
    “Jesus of Nozoroth was resurrected,” Buz said.
    Cohn said that resurrection was probably related to the resurrection of Isaac. “The New Testament scribes always set the Christian unfolding carefully in the Judaic past.”
    “Jesus was the first,” Buz said. “He preached to the chimps.”
    Cohn said that whoever was first, neither Judaism nor Christianity, nor any other religion, had prevented the Day of Devastation.
    “Well, that’s the end of that story,” he told Buz, “except that the Talmudists say Isaac returned from Paradise after three years, to his father’s house, and soon began to look for a bride. According to the commentators, he was thirty-seven years old when the incident of the burnt offering occurred—and even given the evidence, that’s an astonishment.”
    The chimp, after sitting a moment in silence, asked, “When will I get morried, Dod?”
    Cohn, genuinely moved, said he didn’t see how that could happen just then. “I’m afraid there’s nobody